An incoherent culture: life after 'Ozzie & Harriet.' (US society's changing cultural mores)

On cable access television in Westchester County, New York, you can watch a black nationalist as he threatens to kill white people or you can watch a neo-Nazi as he speaks of the need to send black people back to Africa and end the Jewish control of everything. The ACLU prepares to defend Dr. Jack Kevorkian's fight to kill off depressed people. Conflicts between gay Irish and parade organizers disrupted the Saint Patrick's Day parade, as did conflicts between gay Jews and a parade celebrating Israel. In both cases it was a matter of fights versus fights: the fights of the gay groups who wanted to march versus the fights of the parade organizers.

There are great differences here--these are not all equivalent cases. I believe in the right to free speech, and it means tolerating even ACLU fundamentalists who see the fight to free speech as absolute, but see the fight to bear arms as very complicated. Like all fundamentalists, they really don't take the letter of the law all that seriously, but apply it to their favorite causes where it serves their purpose. What all of these cases have in common is that the idea of fights has been used, in each, to balkanize the society. This isn't done deliberately--in the parade cases, reading the interviews with people on both sides made it clear enough that people all seem to want a united society, one based on final agreement, and few people really want to win at the expense of others--but it is an inevitable result of making fights disproportionately important. Communitarians have done a valuable service in bringing the idea of common obligation back into the discussion.

You can learn something by contrasting the current atmosphere with the World War II-era movies in which there were scenes of (for example) a bus-full of people traveling across the country allowing themselves to be led in song. Those movies were as corny. as could be, and could not be done today, except cynically. The fact that they could be done at all is something that separates that time from our own. It was no doubt part of the atmosphere in which wartime propaganda was sincerely produced and just as sincerely received, and so it is our form of socialist realism. At the same time there was something moving about the naivete of it. It appealed to one version of the dream of the possibility of life lived in common. World War II was probably the beginning of the most recent form of this sentimentality, with GIs named O'Leary, Valucci, and Bernstein all headed into battle together. There were excluded minorities all over the place, but an ideal was suggested.

This outlook began to fall apart in the fifties. That era is often remembered in the popular imagination as a quiet time, and even the revisionism (justified, I think) of a writer like Garry Wills, who has argued that Eisenhower was a much better president than Kennedy or Johnson, does not obscure the general impression of a world in which "Ozzie and Harriet," and maybe Henry Luce's Time, were the major cultural influences.

But the fifties were much more complicated and interesting than that. The best abstract expressionist artists--deKooning, Kline, Pollock, Hartigan, Mitchell--were producing wonderful work. If you listen to the Miles Davis recordings from that era they sound fresh, immediate. This is the era in which the beat generation was born, jazz and art got interesting in new ways, and it was all detached from any sort of propaganda. The operative word was "cool." There was an understated reaction going on against those happy singers on the bus. Jack Kerouac could be as sentimental as those old movies, but he was part of a reaction against a deliberate civic culture, a wartime collectivity. The reaction was based on a vision of some genuinely beautiful but difficult-to-define things, and a realization that the civic culture was a lie. This realization was central to the sixties; Vietnam made the sixties happen, in combination with the vision of the fifties.

A lot of cultural history defines itself in reaction to wars. Dadaism and surrealism were reactions to World War I, serious rejections of what an important segment of the artistic community regarded as the presuppositions that led people to accept slaughter. There was an appropriate cynicism that followed the war. No one really knows what that war was about. The beat generation and bop were in their ways reactions to the world revealed in World War II and Korea.

It may be technologically impossible to have another world war, at least in the propaganda sense. During the forties there were only a few radio networks, a relatively few channels of information that could reach great numbers of people within a fairly short time, and they had a friendly attitude toward the people they represented to the public and served. The subservience of the Washington Post's Ben Bradlee to the Kennedy family may have been the last time that was possible. But that is because of technology; the war in Vietnam wasn't one that had the filter earlier wars had. There was no equivalent, in Vietnam, to Ernie Pyle or other cheerleading World War II journalists. It is more difficult to manufacture consensus now, and such technologies as cable television and desk-top publishing offer a much more diverse range of voices and viewpoints. While it may be true that, as A.J. Liebling wrote, "freedom of the press belongs to the man who owns one," it is easier now to own one: technology makes a press a little more affordable. In some ways this is exciting and offers an unprecedented opportunity for cultural democracy, but the opportunity happens in a society which increasingly sees itself made up of competing interest groups. The sense of any common society is eroding fast, and in this context the communitarian impulse is an important one.

I see a problem here, though: that is the idea that this sense of common, mutual obligation can be brought about by political means. A movement away from a rights-based approach to many legal questions may be a beginning, but it could be that the rights-based discourse that currently dominates the political scene is the reflection of a fragmented culture, and not its cause. The question facing us is whether we can move toward a common sense of what we are as a society.

The kind of propaganda that seemed to move most Americans during World War II is probably not possible any more, and isn't desirable. Nor is it possible to coerce us into common understanding, through law. Whether it is possible for us to move away from the increased divisiveness that seems inevitable at present is a vital question. The tensions are not simply expressions of cultural diversity; the divisions are deeper than that, and have to do with radical and irreconcilable visions of what life is meant to be about. It is impossible to think of a society continuing as a single thing, in any sense, unless there is a profound movement in another direction.