America and the Culture of Now

Since the creation of the Interstate Highway System we have been able to ride from coast to coast with only minor deviations from a uniform standard.  We can predict within an hour how long it will take to go from Jacksonville, Florida and Santa Monica, California, on Interstate 10.  We can visualize every meal and every gas station stop along the way.  We can even plan our time around the television programs we want to watch in our hotel rooms – completely oblivious to the diversity we pass through; the cultures and environments that historically defined America.

We used to deviate from our speed and path to avoid potholes or mud puddles, or to take in a meal in an unfamiliar town.  We used to wake up in the morning to explore the culture of a new place, if only for breakfast and a conversation before continuing our travels.  Rather than focusing exclusively on the destination, we absorbed the dignity of varied and unique cultures along the way.  The differences from our own culture may have been slight and easy to understand, or almost other worldly, but each interaction expanded our insight into the larger human condition.

The impact of these encounters allowed us to see America as an array of cultures, with each adding to the health and diversity of the nation.  From our travels we carried away small pieces of these cultures and integrated them into our own.  Whether it was a recipe, or a sense of respect for something that was sacred, we learned of values that were equivalent to ours.  It was in our acknowledgement and respect of these other places that the dignity of other cultures perpetuated our sense of strength through diversity in the nation.  Most of us are now relegated to collecting replicas of culture, disconnected from the environment, and even more disconnected from the hands and mind that created the original artifacts.

Historically, cultures evolved as a means of transforming local environments to resolve social needs.  This transformation maximized the unique and diverse natural and cultural capital of all things that formed the community, and preserved the integrity, if not the dignity of those places.   The unique and diverse cultures within these communities are analogous to the biodiversity of a virgin forest.  To maintain a healthy forest, niches between dominant species provide an alternative genetic stock in the event that the majority falls prey to disease or predation.

All of this I say in past tense, because by most people’s standards it seems that social diversity of the West is rapidly devolving into a monoculture of efficiency.  Whether by choice or circumstance, efficiency is rapidly insinuating itself as the primary principle governing American and European culture.  The principle of market efficiency dictates that uniformity maximizes access.  But, a uniform and monolithic efficiency that allows us all to partake equally in commercial opportunities can also uproot cultures that are uniquely tied to a specific environment if those cultures do not meet the goal of efficiency.  The free market is not free, but with each individual cost cumulatively chipping away from the foundation of diversity, allows a deadly substitution of the losses that lead to an increasingly oblivious and unsustainable world.

A snowball rolling down hill grows in mass, momentum, and force until it can remove anything in its path.  In the same way, corporations and other monolithic cultures focus energy on the acquisition of greater mass and capital to eliminate obstacles in achieving a superior corporate objective.  Integrity, not dignity, is the preferred vehicle for achieving corporate goals.  Integrity is rule based and measurable, thus progress can be assessed, and efficiency can be pursued.  Making things more uniform allows us to spend more time on other pursuits, even if that pursuit is in finding ways to further increase efficiency.

No law (except the remorseless survival of the fittest) dictates that the dominant culture must predate and suppress alternative cultures into niches, and then to eradicate them. It is, however, in the short sighted interest of the prevailing monoculture to ensure mutations or predecessors are diminished.  Such suppression prevents the cross-pollination of ideas that could alter what is understood, superficially desired, and controllable.  In a dignified society, it is the protection and nurturing of diversity that is the measure of health and progress of a community, not our capacity to predict outcomes by creating uniformity.

To maintain some control over the paving of unique cultural artifacts and mores (we once found so copious in travels off the interstate highways) we attempt to harness the efficient corporate juggernaut and steer it away from its relentless drive toward greater ubiquity but, we are failing.  It is in the last bastions of off-the-freeway communities, the backwoods of rural America, in the unique customs still practiced in homes that these precious natural and cultural materials remain perilously perched in niches to inform the diversity of culture.

It is our obligation to natural and social dignity to protect these niches from the corporate snowball rolling downhill, to inform others, and encourage the practice of the inefficient dignity of learning and sharing diversity that will keep us as a culturally diverse and healthy society.