Cultural Poverty of the United States

In recent times, some of our political candidates have spoken up against 'poverty'. I wonder if this is the right term to use. If what is being referred to is poverty and the destitution that goes with it, then the priority should be to eliminate it. Without denying that poverty still can be found in the United States, I think what people are more often referring to is not true poverty, but income inequality, lack of access to health care and good schools, lack of well-paying jobs, and other impediments to getting and maintaining secure wealth: in other words, economic insecurity. My observation tells me that economic insecurity is much more often the problem than true poverty, as I understand the term. It threatens our national way of life.

There is no question that we are vulnerable economically at this time in our history, and that some kind of decisive action needs to be taken to forestall long-term decline. Unfortunately, the kinds of decisive actions we would need would go against the grain of not just our political, but our social culture. And when I mention social culture, I feel I should also add that we do suffer, as a nation, a kind of poverty that would drag down any effort towards national improvement in any arena of life; I am referring to cultural poverty.

America used to possess a vital 'vernacular' or folk culture (another term would be popular culture, but the common meaning of that term has changed so much as to make it misleading in this instance). In our country, folk culture could be found in many locales: the immigrant enclaves of our cities, our rural areas, particularly in the South; threads of a distinct American everyday culture could actually be found anywhere that had a distinct regional character (which was, at one time, most areas of the country). Our folk culture had many wonderful manifestations: regional folk music styles, certain sports, ways of life, crafts, customs, foods.

Nowadays, most of these products of regional American culture require conscious preservation for them to survive in any form. It is obvious to everyone that we have become homogenized; we have lost our regional folkways (the ones which have produced some unique cultural products, from blues music to stickball*). Consumerism, mass communications and entertainment are some of the powerful agents of conformity that have caused this. The only cultural sub-groups that exist authentically outside of the mainstream are the ones primarily guided by their religion.

*though the effort is self-conscious, some vernacular arts, such as bluegrass music, are actually thriving as the result of a massive effort of cultivation and preservation.

Independent creative folk culture is seemingly on the wane. The hope is that through thoughtful preservation, the folk arts can somehow remain vital. They may not be integrated into our daily lives as intimately as they once were, but at least they won't die out altogether, and could even continue developing.

However, the decline of traditional folkways is not the primary cause of the cultural poverty I was referring to earlier; it is a symptom of it. In discussing this, let us switch over to a second definition of 'culture': the local and national norms, customs, rituals, conventions etc. that shape our behavior, sometimes inhibiting and regimenting it, at all times giving our lives some kind of order, if not value and meaning.

This aspect of culture has never been as strong in the United States as in the older nations. We may have social classes, but no class system. We may practice politeness, but decorum seems more than what is necessary. There is no institution we do not alter in order to give ourselves more freedom, when possible and practical: law, religion, marriage, family, school. Our personal ideal is to be open and free with one another; social reserve makes us suspicious. The hauteur we perceive in some foreigners is repellent to Americans.

Many people have observed these things about us. And I am only repeating what we have all heard already when I say that another tendency of ours is to make convenience and practicality the measure of a thing's value. This is especially true of food, to give just one example. I'm pretty sure that breakfast cereal, fast food, pre-packaged snacks, and other ways of making eating less troublesome were American innovations.

I know all these are banal observations. But while our love of personal freedom, convenience, choice, and so forth have been enduring parts of our character, they have never been as unfettered as during the last two to three generations. We have become more convinced of our entitlement to absolute freedom of action, while doing away with any central guiding principles for our personal and civic lives; the effect on our society has been confusing, and even damaging in some cases.

What 'guiding principles' could I be referring to? Not 'decency' or 'morals', or anything like them. As it is with our folk culture, any decline in the sense of right and wrong that one may perceive is not a cause, but a symptom of something else that is larger but less visible.

Ours has never been as hierarchical a society as some others, nor has it been especially authoritarian. But there was a time when we shared a greater faith that authority would be used for a benevolent purpose. We once believed, more so than now, that authority properly lay with government, with family, with school, and other institutions of society; we did not question it because it would not have occurred to us to to do so. We believed in the accumulated wisdom of these institutions. We also had a passive belief, but a belief all the same, that society's natural order was indeed hierarchical. Parents, school administrations, police, the military, government representatives, etc. were above the rest of society, and it was our natural place to follow and obey them.

One can't go any further without acknowledging that in a hierarchical society, certain groups are held in an inferior position unfairly and against their will. We know this has been true in our society no less than in any other; we have also learned that it is unwise to follow authority unquestioningly. Those who have fought, often heroically, against hierarchies of race, class, and sex have bettered our society immeasurably; the same may be said about those who have fought against the unwise or unfair use of the official instruments of authority.

Perhaps in order to ensure that we would suffer the least possible injustice at the hands of societal, governmental, or familial authorities, we have weakened them, and given them an excess of oversight. The school, the policeman, the parent, the government, and so forth all hold less power over us than they formerly did. This is not entirely unwelcome -- individuals should not be totally powerless in the face of an arbitrary instrument of authority. And we need to have continuing vigilance to make sure that the power of authority is wielded fairly.

I would offer that the dilution of authority in our society has been a double-edged sword. It has made every action, every decision that would have an impact on others frought with ramifications; as a result, we are often paralyzed. One can easily find examples of large-scale projects that would have been undertaken decisively by earlier generations lying half-finished, or languishing in the beginning stages. Specifically, I would argue that the stalled effort to rebuild New Orleans, the decision about how to build on the World Trade Center site, the search for alternative fuels and modes of transportation are but three examples of how our ambivalence towards authority has led not to more enlightened decisions, but simple inaction.

Our thoughtless rejection of authority on principle has done as much harm in the private as it has in the public sphere. While we may agree, if asked, that parental authority, for example, should be final, the broad culture undermines parental authority. In the popular culture, parents are often shown as well-meaning dolts, self-absorbed, or simply incompetent. And if many parents heave off the burden of having to wield authority over their children, it is because the 'culture' (or, what is 'in the air'), gives them tacit permission to do so. Certainly, parents who try to be strict go well against the grain of contemporary thinking. I can't say for certain whether kids are any less well-mannered than in earlier generations -- every generation complains about its children's manners -- but I'm pretty sure that children are no longer expected to present themselves with any amount of formality, in private or in public.

The authority of the teacher and the school is also greatly diminished by our rejection of authority as an abstract principle. For as much lip-service as we pay to the importance of education, the teaching profession itself is not respected; the decisions handed down by the teacher or administration are seen as provisional, if they go against the wishes of dissatisfied parents or of other parties. The multifarious cures being offered for our underachieving schools would be unnecessary if the incivility, slatternly personal self-presentation, and watered-down thought and intellectual content that are tolerated in the broader society could somehow be kept away from the classroom.

In the domain of the arts, it is seen as stodgy to maintain that there is a body of visual art, literature, history, and so forth that is deserving of preservation and study more than the rest. With the abandonment of a hierarchy, as it were, of culture, we have allowed almost every cultural product to have its day. This is not an entirely bad development. Leaving aside that any set of criteria for judging the worth of art is biased and myopic, obviously some of the art that once would have been considered 'low' deserves attention on its own terms. But in (rightly) recognizing that standards of 'quality' are arbitrary, we have then allowed ourselves to think it is better to have no standard at all. This attitude, combined with our faith that technological progress should always be embraced, is causing society to be altered in unpredictable ways.

I would love to have it demonstrated that our everyday culture is as strong as it once was. But by almost every measure I can think of, American culture is has become progressively weaker, across the social spectrum. Families in which there is strong, intact structure have become the exception; with the decline of family life there has also been the gradual disappearance of handed-down cultural traditions: foods, crafts, rituals. People increasingly live in communities that, either by accident or by design, are culture-free, in that they have no ties to any kind of shared past. In most households, what culture there is to be found is of the instantaneous, electronic kind. Though some would have us believe that the new electronic media are allowing the mind to develop in new, possibly beneficial ways, time may show that they have a spiritual cost we cannot measure.

I won't try to convince anyone that our country is a coarser place than it was before. But it is a less interesting place than it used to be. The negative social effects that stem from a lack of a strong, agreed-upon culture apparently can be withstood; it is almost harder, somehow, to live where there is little sense of place.

The Decline of Everyday Photography

Photographs may confound the viewer as much as they reveal, and if I'm not mistaken, that is at least some of the allure of photography, and is a justification for calling it one of the fine arts. I love the ambiguity of photographs; the best photographers (not including nature photographers), it seems to me, are the ones who can expertly blend the chance and mystery that are intrinsic to captured images with their own artistic intention.

Ordinary snapshots, yearbook pictures, portraits and so forth don't have that kind of "intentionality", but to me they reveal something about the personae, if not the actual characters, of their subjects. Go through any collection of American family snapshots from the 1930's to the present, and you will probably see some striking trends. Up until the early 1970's, people seem more restrained in photographs. The range of behavior that was captured on camera was quite limited: usually the people are posing; occasionally they may be sitting in an automobile, or swimming or engaged in some other leisure or sport activity. Nowadays almost every aspect of life seems a worthy subject for a snapshot.

Prior to about 1973, you would seldom have found anyone making a face deliberately at the camera, or being otherwise provocative (the exception might have been pictures taken in photo booths). There is nothing inherently good or bad about this in itself; it is just something that one notes in looking at family photographs across the decades. However, there is a troubling feature of snapshot photography that one can't as easily dismiss (beginning, again, around 1973 and continuing on up to the present) : at a certain point, people generally began to look awful in photographs.

This generalization is as broad as they come, but I can defend it easily if you show me your family pictures (if they span at least forty years). The pictures up to 1970 or so will have a restraint about them. The human subjects will be well-, if more conservatively and uniformly clothed -- their hair-styles will be old-fashioned, but not displeasing. Most of all, the people in them will present themselves with a noticeable reserve, one for which one nowadays might be nostalgic. For to look at your family pictures, from the early '70's onwards, would cause one, in many cases, to blush and to cringe.

Part of the problem was technical advances in quick photography that made colors more lifelike and the visual sense of the picture much more immediate. Of course, one can't discount the hair and clothing styles that seem so laughable with a little hindsight. But these aesthetic landmarks are not the real cause of what I believe is a terrible decline in everyday photographs.

I am convinced that we are the ones who ruin, however innocently, most of the photographs that are taken of us. We feel obliged to show a whole set of emotions all at once when the shot is taken; this often gives us a distorted or vulgar appearance in the resulting picture. We think it is not worth our trouble to maintain our dignity before a camera; it should not then surprise us that we appear undignified in most of our pictures. Our clothing is of generally low quality, with too many garish colors and designs -- our clothes don't come out well in pictures. We also never seem to mind being photographed, no matter the time of day, the setting, our physical state, our frame of mind; we could be much more discriminating in permitting others to take our picture. We don't pose as often, or as well as we should for our pictures; we are happy to be captured in a state that we would consider more 'normal', not considering that our normal, moment-to-moment actions come out appearing very ordinary when caught in an instantaneous moment in time. Our photographers themselves are not blameless either: they take their shots at awkward angles; they surprise us, and they take too many pictures of us for more than a few of them to be any good.

While we might, on an individual basis, do more to ensure that the ever-expanding photographic record of our lives should become more bearable for others to look at, the problem and the responsibility are beyond the reach of our own decision-making. Our culture allows us to show ourselves in public in practically any state whatsoever without anyone's disapprobation (let's admit that we have all benefitted from the convenience offered by this lax attitude at one time or another). But your family's picture collection is diminished by the many images it contains of you and your loved ones in a more or less disheveled state. I might have trouble convincing you that public places are harder to bear now than they used to be, merely because of peoples' appearance; but I believe I would have a better chance of convincing you of it by showing you your photograph.