How to make American stupid again: On the two ideas of culture

There are two ideas of culture. Either social life and relationships between people is in some way primary, and one makes use of this in learning things by the experience of things like texts and artworks; or, language is primary, and so it is texts that mediate the formation of a sensibility and mode of thinking, and thus in turn one's relationships.

French society, rooted in its educational system much more than ours is, is organized in the second way, while American society takes the first path.

Because of this, Americans think that to actually learn anything, they have to be taking a class, which grounds and legitimates their learning of the thing being studied in a social context. This is quite remarkable. Of course, the classes people take are part of an apparatus of socialization (and social control). More broadly, Americans use their social interactions to develop and articulate a tacit ideology, and this is why when people see or listen to works of art that they in fact share, they almost never talk about what anything in them means; instead, popular culture (film, television, pop music, and now social media) are used to fine-tune one’s adaptation to the social environment. This is partly subconscious, and the conscious part of it finds its way into talk whose essential purpose is to mediate and enhance one’s cultural capital and coolness. Consequently, while Americans are often quite cultivated in pop culture terms at least, they, curiously, absorb the social criticisms that often are prominent in these artworks, but from a stance that is not a socially critical one; the point instead is to enhance their own social skills, which are constantly adjusted tacitly to new representations, treated as reflecting social conditions requiring complex adaptations, but not as calling for reflection. The only people who engage in the latter, outside the compulsion of schools with their graded assignments and classrooms, are artists themselves.

Some people buck this system and became self-taught men and women, usually at the price of affirming some kind of ridiculous American extreme posture of individualism (the Beat poets, Emerson and Thoreau, a popular 'existentialism', etc.). It is a posture, more pose than position; and a position not of persons “in” a language and expression of thought, but rather the American idea of a position, which justifies itself by what it represents (a claim, but ultimately just a property right or a power claim reducible to it) and is only to be defended not with arguments but by force. The earlier form of this in our nation’s history was the organized retreat into a religion, which enables one to hold claims of universal import but in a private manner, which among other things shields those claims from public examination.

In French society, social life is based upon the language, to the point where a grammatical or syntactic error in speech tends to become indiscernible from a social faux pas. (It is true that in the extreme this makes it hard to criticize anything, but there are ways in which one can, although it is fair to say that in the role of student one cannot.) The French mind has as consequence a kind of 'linearity' that the German mind also lacks. In particular, German Jewish thought before the Third Reich depended heavily on a sense of the possible exteriority and priority of a sensibility, intellectually (as can be elaborated in terms of forms of thought), to the language and the society identified with it. The German ideology of "Culture" (Kultur) was upheld, particularly by the non-Jewish majority, as something to be worshipped and enforced, but it retained the character of a contingent possibility. The German sensibility was absorbed into American culture after the war, while a bit later French thought became central to elite culture in the humanities as facilitating the articulation of a strong ideology, taking the form of a dogmatic theorizing. This affected most people I knew who attended a university then, before the recent onslaught of identity politics that seemed to many of us to want to disenfranchise us in depriving us of the ability to repose in a certain way on the French theory complex. The theories were studied, believed in, often combined in a synthetic manner that is largely absent in France and unique to the American mind; they were not the result of rigorous thinking, and for some reason philosophical and theoretical writing in the English language, including in America, which has a post-revolutionary culture that is republican, individualist, and democratically egalitarian in a way that England is not, tends to be pedestrian and state obvious truths, by reason of which educated people should shut the fuck up when around more normal Americans. Of course, our society remains very brutal in much of its social and cultural life. I think the fundamental reason is that we think being democratic is despising the life of the mind, since it belongs to elites. It need not, of course. There is no reason why an adult from a less privileged background in America could not be like Jack London's Martin Eden, a person who, lacking a rigorous education in childhood and first youth, is eager to make the conquest of it even in adulthood. There are prisoners who do this, and they deserve our admiration, some greatly. There were ex-slaves who did this, too.

If Americans, in youth or maturity, studied our own culture and that of the world's that our culture has long valued as well on the grounds of what originally was our republican and egalitarian form of imperialist universality, ours would be a better functioning and happier society. But there is an alternative:

Suppose that instead of making education central to the formation of our society and of individuals within it, we make health central. There are normal people who do alright at their boring jobs, along with elites who also do and add to this their mastery of the codes of propriety in terms of how you can talk about anything -- codes that now divide the society rather artificially, by racial and ethnic origin mainly and sometimes by gender or sexuality, into the two classes of "privileged" and "oppressed"; and then there are the people who fail, are called dysfunctional, and are supposed to be sent out for repair work to doctors and therapists. Learning and the life of the mind have been replaced by health care and correctional procedures (as well as regimes of sanctions for the violations of social propriety that, especially for the less privileged, are constantly expected, as the most perspicuous dispositional trait of the poor). We don't want to be a society of citizens who know how to think well and clearly, partly to work at jobs some few of which require this, partly solve problems that arise wherever they do, and partly to live the good life. Instead we want to be a people who are successful and happy because we can pay the debts and bills or buy things we want, and who are 'healthy' in a way that makes them well-adjusted and normal. But the normalizing society is the punitive one.

Social relationships, like forms of governance, should only be considered primary in terms of our study of them. This would have among its benefits that relationships and the society itself become criticizable, and in terms that do not reduce to mere sophism (according to which there are no general truths but only private opinions).

One could hope that American business leaders would recognize that our economy requires an educated populace. Does it? The higher level jobs require personnel who are well-educated. Most jobs do not. Though they may require a 'right thinking' in terms of the opinions people are expected to hold and that are manifest in how they navigate the minefield of rules of decorum that now are mainly about managing the "privileged"/"oppressed" duality in terms largely of moral codes applicable to the speech of store and office workers. Imagine by contrast if the movement of the 1930s that resulted in many industrial workers being organized and able to strike for higher wages (today most union contracts contain "no-strike" pledges, as the unions have been absorbed into management and pose little risk or threat of opposition), if instead of better wages and working conditions, and a shorter working week and day, people demanded only that they be spoken to properly. Now much of the proletariat, which is part-time, occasional, or temporary and so with no job security and subject to the broad social conditions of "precarity," is educated. And what is the purpose of their education? It is only to say the right things and "know" the "true facts," which in schools are elicited by multiple choice exams. In France, examinations are still focused on essay-writing. But then in France the educational system is in many ways the central structuring force in the society, a role that in America in recent decades has been played by military contracts, and more broadly by business and ideologies associated with it.