Presented at the Berlin Future Forum
, October 2016: From Multicultural Conflict to Transcultural Coherence
by Troy Earl Camplin, Ph.D.
From Kitsch to Beauty: A Theory of Conflict and Complexity
TABLE OF CONTENT
I
Introduction
II A Gay Marriage: Nietzsche and Hegel
III On Cultural Universals and Our Evolved Human Nature
IV On Culture and Kitsch
V On Culture and Beauty
VI Meanwhile, Back in the Real World…
VII Conclusion
VIII Bibliography
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From Kitsch to Beauty: A Theory of Conflict and Complexity
I.
Introduction
The world seems to be faced with a crisis. It is a crisis caused by multiculturalism, which
has simultaneously opened the world to the toleration of a variety of other cultures and
closed us off from understanding each other’s cultures. It is driven by good intentions
and a bad theory of individualism which sees individuals (and in its collectivist version,
cultures) as radically separated from each other and in many ways unable to understand
each other. If this theory is true, the best we can expect is the kind of toleration of each
other preached by the multiculturalists and other left-wing ideologies.
But is it true? F. A. Hayek in his essay “Individualism: True and False” (1948: 1-32)
suggests there is another option in the socially-constructed individual in which each
person is individuated through a negotiation among the person’s inherited traits and the
culture/society into which the person is thrown from birth. This is a much more
complex version of the individual than the one believed in (and often caricatured by) the
postmodern, multicultural left. And we will see, this version also gives us a way out of
the impasse created by multiculturalism.
Complexity is the key. Multiculturalism tends to simplify the world too much. It merely
reverses the Western culture-good, other cultures-bad dichotomy; it isolates cultures
from each other and insists we cannot know anything about each other; it views the
individual as atomized and therefore in need of socializing through collective action. We
need to move beyond this toward a more complex, interactive view. All cultures have
elements that are good and elements that are bad, sometimes for themselves and
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sometimes for other cultures; cultures can and should learn from each other; the
individual is socially embedded and socially individuated and is therefore naturally
social. In each case the rules of interaction emerge from the interactions of individuals
and/or cultures, resulting in emergent properties for those cultures and in the emergent
transculture.
In this paper I plan to lay out the case for moving from the current multiculturalist
paradigm and toward a much more complex transculturalist paradigm. I will argue that
paradoxical relations underlie complex emergent systems, meaning if we want to
nurture healthy complex systems, we have to embrace those paradoxical relations rather
than seek to privilege one over the other. Next I will argue for the existence of human
universals out of which all cultures have developed, and which in turn allows people
from different cultures to understand each other. I will also argue that a collectivist
world view results in embracing kitsch, meaning we do not respect difference and
variety and, therefore, beauty. Transculturalism must embrace beauty precisely because
it embraces both universality and difference simultaneously. Finally, I will suggest how
we can move away from mere theory to how to bring transculturalism into practice. A
moral view is more than just ideas; it must result in good practice as well. But first,
theory.
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II.
A Gay Marriage: Nietzsche and Hegel
Hegel is perhaps most famous for his idea of dialectics, in which ideas evolve through
stages of thesis, anti-thesis, and synthesis, with each synthesis becoming a new thesis
that generates its own anti-thesis, etc. While Marx famously took a materialist
historicist approach to this idea, resulting in dialectical materialism, Nietzsche
responded to Hegel by pointing out that conflicts are in fact never resolved, but always
remain. For Nietzsche, resolving conflicts would undermine culture itself, since culture
is made dynamic through the interactions of conflicts in a given society, or even between
different societies and cultures. In other words, where Hegel thought history had
“ended” with the emergence of Romanticism, and where Marx expected the end of
history in Communism, Nietzsche points out that since cultures rely on underlying
conflicts for their very existence, there can be no end to conflicts and, thus, there can be
no end to history. Thus there is no historical telos toward which all cultures are aiming.
There are two ways in which these ideas developed by Hegel/Marx and Nietzsche have
been synthesized—actually, one way, from two different perspectives. The first I want to
mention is the idea of evolving and complexifying time experience as developed by J.T.
Fraser (cf. Fraser 1999). The second is the idea of evolving, complexifying psychosocial
development, particularly as developed by Clare Graves (cf. Beck and Cowan 1996).
Both involve (though only Fraser explicitly uses and expands on the idea) the idea of
umwelts, or different ways of experiencing the world. (A third way, compatible with
Fraser and Graves, is the world of Hector Sabelli 2005.)
The theory of umwelts was developed by the semiotician Jakob von Uexküll to try to
explain how different species of animals experienced the world in different ways (Fraser
1999: 23). Fraser expands on this idea beyond the way living species experience the
world to the way each level of existence—quantum physical, macrophysical, biological,
human, etc.—experience the world. And although Graves does not use the term, his
theory of evolving, complexifying psychosocial development is essentially the theory of
umwelts applied to humans. In other words, the degree of psychological complexity you
have, which is determined by the degree of social complexity in which you live, affects
the way you experience the world.
How does this relate to Hegel/Marx and Nietzsche? Both Fraser and Graves argued that
paradoxical relations lay at the heart of each level of reality/human psychosocial
development, and that new levels of complexity emerge in order to “resolve” paradoxes.
However, those paradoxical relations continue to exist, since the old levels never
actually disappear, and the new levels result in their own paradoxical relations, which in
turn have to be resolved. For example, the paradoxes that famously underlie quantum
mechanical processes, including atoms, are resolved in chemical interactions that
stabilize the constituent atoms. The emergence of life equally stabilizes certain complex
chemical processes. Each level responds to its environment and creates its environment,
which has consequences for the emergence of new temporal experiences.
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Equally, from a Gravesean perspective, human psychology is a product of its
environment, even as it causes that environment. The more complex the social
environment, the more complex the psychologies of the members of that society. More
people in higher interactive densities creates paradoxes that have to be resolved, but
cannot be resolved at that level of reality.
Let us take for example a small tribe. In small tribes it’s important to reduce envy to
maintain social cohesion. A great hunter, then, may hold back to ensure that other
hunters end up doing as well as he has been doing. This, however, creates psychological
conflicts—the great hunter may, for example, wonder why he ought to hold back when if
he hunted at his maximum potential the tribe would greatly benefit from all the food he
could provide. Let’s say he decides to do just that. What would be the response? An
increase in envy, for one. And of shame. Imagine if you cannot provide for your family
as well as your neighbor, who ends up feeding your family for you because of it. How,
then, do we solve this conflict? We have a paradox where if the great hunter
demonstrates excellence, it harms the tribe, while if he doesn’t, it harms the tribe.
Suppose, though, that the great hunter points out that he’s not a great spear-maker or
bow and arrow maker, but that someone else is. If he proposes that he will provide meat
in exchange for great weapons with which to hunt, both men are better off. Neither is
shamed, both are providing for their families, and both are creating more value through
specialization. In fact, because each is creating more value through specialization, the
tribe itself can become larger than it otherwise could. The paradoxical conflict that arose
in the psychologies of the people of the tribe drove the creation of a more complex
society, which will in turn pull more people into having that same psychology that drove
the creation of the more complex society.
We can therefore see that the resolution of paradoxical relations/conflicts results in the
emergence of greater complexity, which results in the emergence of more paradoxical
relations. The number of paradoxes at the quantum physical level is dwarfed by the
number of paradoxical relations of humans just as the number of paradoxical relations
in a tribal society is dwarfed by the number of paradoxical relations in our postmodern
multicultural neoliberal societies. At the same time, the underlying levels never go away,
meaning their paradoxical relations never go away, either. Humans are biological, which
are in turn chemical, which are in turn quantum physical. Humans are made of atoms.
Also, we members of postmodern multicultural neoliberal societies exhibit the various
levels identified by Graves—entrepreneurial, authoritative, egocentric, tribal, and pretribal—at the same time. We members of contemporary society remain tribal, and we
remain apes.
In other words, new levels of complexity, whether physical, psychological, or social,
emerge precisely because of and through conflict. But it is a special kind of conflict. It is
not a conflict resulting in elimination of the Other; rather, it is a conflict that
strengthens and reinforces the Other in order to strengthen and reinforce the Self. It is
cooperation to compete.
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This idea to cooperate to compete is hardly new or surprising. We see it happening
everywhere. Sports teams rely on cooperation in order for the competitions to take
place. Businesses require cooperation at the level of the business in order to compete
with other businesses. They also require competition with other supporting businesses
in order to compete with businesses providing similar good or services. In a democratic
republic such as we find in the West, political parties cooperate to compete for votes—
including peaceful transfers of power when they lose. Whether we are playing games or
participating in the economy or engaging in the political process, we are always
cooperating to compete. Graves and Fraser just happened to notice that this process was
taking place in physical, biological, psychological, and social evolution as well. Indeed, it
seems that nature keeps finding the same solutions at different levels of complexity to
the emergence of new paradoxes (Camplin 2009).
A good example of this comes from the evolution of eukaryotic cells, to which we can
compare the current paradigm of multiculturalism. Multiculturalism is founded on the
idea of tolerance. If you have a world in which the Other is killed simply for being other,
and reducing violence among groups is your goal, then certainly tolerance is a vital idea.
It is a necessary first step for creating a cosmopolitan, liberal society, and that is why
such works as John Locke’s “A Letter Concerning Toleration” and Voltaire’s “A Treatise
on Toleration” were vital for the emergence of such a society in the West. I would
suggest that it’s certainly a necessary first step if you are going to have any sort of coexistence. Which brings me back to the emergence of eukaryotic cells.
It is likely that, over 3 billion years ago, a eubacterium invaded an archaebacterium and
something remarkable happened. Usually one would dissolve the other. Certainly there
was no tolerance of another species invading oneself. Other organisms were to be eaten
or would eat you. Yet in this one instance, the archaebacterium tolerated the presence of
the eubacterium. And that set it on a course to be the ancestor of complex life such as
you and me. However, mere tolerance of the eubacterium’s presence was hardly enough.
No, the two had to learn to work together, with each benefitting the other. Only when
tolerance moved into appreciation (so to speak) did we in fact have a true eukaryotic
ancestor. That is, when each came to rely on the existence of the other, such that they
could not be separated without harm, did we have a eukaryotic cell with mitochondria.
(The same process also took place when a eukaryotic cell similarly absorbed without
dissolving a cyanobacterium to form the first plant cell with chloroplasts.)
In this particular case we have a kind of literally material dialectic between ancestral
(archaebacteria) and more recent (eubacteria) life forms to create a new kind of life form
at a higher level of complexity, itself then capable of even greater complexity (in the
eventual emergence of multicellular organisms) than were the various kinds of
prokaryotes. But for this to happen, we first had to have tolerance, and then a move
beyond mere tolerance to complete acceptance. When the archaebacterium fully
accepted the eubacterium as part of itself is when the first true eukaryote was born.
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To have a more complex society, we cannot settle for mere tolerance. We cannot
therefore settle for mere multiculturalism. The problem with tolerance is that it still
leaves us open to intolerance. If we are merely putting up with the Other, it won’t take
much for us to decide we don’t need to put up with them anymore. It is then easy to
move from tolerance to intolerance, from the casual liberalism with which we are
familiar to illiberalism.
For the longest time we have sought to ensure greater tolerance for our fellow human
beings. We are told we should tolerate other races, other ethnicities, other genders,
other sexual orientations, other ways of living and of thinking. This is an importance
step for anyone whose knee-jerk response to difference is to burn the person at the
stake. When that's a person’s natural response, then getting people to simply be willing
to tolerate other people's existence is a move in the right direction.
But we should not be satisfied with tolerance. I don't want to be merely tolerated, and
neither do you. To be tolerated means to be put up with. You live over there and let me
pretend you don't exist. I’ll live over here and you pretend I don’t exist. The problem
with (and benefit of) this approach is that neither one of us has to learn anything about
the other. If we were to do so, we might learn we don’t like what we’ll learn; on the other
hand, if we were to do so, we might learn how few true differences there are between us.
In truth, though, none of us was to be merely tolerated. Each of us wants to be accepted.
I personally want "be yourself" to be meant literally, and when I am myself, for that self
to be appreciated. I want to be enjoyed and loved and I want people to be excited by my
presence. And so do you.
Let me give a personal example that strays away from many of the hot-button issues
listed above. My parents always tolerated the things I (and my brother) wanted to do.
They tolerated my interests (writing, plants, reading etc.), but never really encouraged
any of them (a few they actively discouraged, such as music). They tolerated my choice
of what to major in in college (recombinant gene technology) when they really thought I
ought to major in pre-med or pre-law to become a doctor or a lawyer. They were hardly
supportive of my deciding to get a Master's in English, and even when I graduated with
my Ph.D. in the humanities, my father asked me if I regretted not finishing my Master's
in biology (by then he had come around to my majoring in biology). I have accomplished
all of the things I did despite the direct lack of support. They never stood in my way, but
my parents never quite supported me, either.
On the other hand, I've had a few along the way who did encourage me. Those were the
people who made the difference. There was a biology/chemistry teacher in high school
and a biology teacher at the Governor's Scholars Program I did one summer who both
encouraged my interests in genetics. There was a poet at Western Kentucky University
who encouraged my poetry. I was eventually encouraged (after some pretty harsh
criticism) in my fiction writing at the University of Southern Mississippi. And I was
encouraged in my scholarly work at UT-Dallas by my dissertation committee. I was
encouraged by a theater owner when it came to my plays (too bad the theater went out
of business before we could stage my first full length play). This summer my wife has
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been incredibly encouraging as I have had to go through six weeks of training, which
included 5 weeks of teaching summer school. Each of these people and their
encouragement and acceptance gave me the strength to go on.
That's the difference between tolerance and acceptance. Those who accept actively
participate in our success through encouragement to be who we are. Those who tolerate
simply get out of the way. Sometimes that's necessary, but isn't it much better to have a
helping hand through life? It's it better to have people love you for who you deeply, truly
are? Of course it is.
The thing with acceptance, though, is that it can be intolerant of some things. But that’s
not necessarily a bad thing. To have a healthy body, the immune system must fully
accept the heart, lungs, and joints while it must remain intolerant of whatever would
make the body ill, including cancer (think of cancer as a single kind of cell seeking to
make the entire body just that one kind of cell). To have a healthy society, we need to
move beyond mere tolerance and into acceptance, but that also means learning what to
accept and what not to tolerate. How can we come to recognize those that can make the
social body in all its diversity and cosmopolitanism sick, whether it be external disease
or cancer? How do we move from a Nietzschean multiculturalism of tolerance to a
Nietzschean-Hegelian transculturalism of acceptance (and love and respect) without
complete dissolution into a Hegelian monolculture?
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III.
On Cultural Universals and Our Evolved Human Nature
Human brains have various structures that have definite effects on our behavior and in
making us who we are—that is, we have a large number of human instincts, which get
themselves expressed as “human universals” in our varied cultures. We have, according
to E. O. Wilson (actually, George P. Murdock, whom Wilson is quoting), identified at
least sixty-seven cultural universals so far:
age-grading, athletic sports, bodily adornment, calendar, cleanliness training,
community organization, cooking, cooperative labor, cosmology, courtship,
dancing, decorative art, divination, division of labor, dream interpretation,
education, eschatology, ethics, ethno-botany, etiquette, faith healing, family
feasting, fire-making, folklore, food taboos, funeral rites, games, gestures, giftgiving, government, greetings, hair styles, hospitality, housing, hygiene, incest
taboos, inheritance rules, joking, kin groups, kinship nomenclature, language, law,
luck superstitions, magic, marriage, mealtimes, medicine, obstetrics, penal
sanctions, personal names, population policy, postnatal care, pregnancy usages,
property rights, propitiation of supernatural beings, puberty customs, religious
ritual, residence rules, sexual restrictions, soul concepts, status differentiation,
surgery, tool-making, trade, visiting, weather control, and weaving. (1976: 160)
Each of these, in various forms, can be found in every culture, throughout history. My
guess is there are many more than just these. In Natural Classicism, Frederick Turner
adds combat, gifts, mime, friendship, lying, love, storytelling, murder taboos, and poetic
meter to the list of sixty-seven. And in The Culture of Hope, and in Beauty, he gives a
list of what he calls neurocharms, many of which could also be considered cultural
universals, since they are found in every human culture. Many of these, such as
narrative, selecting, classification, musical meter, tempo, rhythm, tone, melody,
harmony, and pattern recognition can be found in other animals, including
chimpanzees, gibbons, and birds. Others, such as giving meaning to certain color
combinations, divination, hypothesis, metaphysical synthesis, collecting, metaphor,
syntactical organization, gymnastics, the martial arts, mapping, the capacity for
geometry and ideography, poetic meter, cuisine, and massage (which would be a
development of mammalian and primate grooming rituals, which humans also engage
in, as any couple can tell you), are uniquely human. Each of these can be found in every
culture around the world. Kenrick et al (2002, 2003) show the kinds of dynamics which
can result in variations from a set of tendencies. Recognizing the fact that universals can
give rise to differences is central to our moving away from multiculturalism and toward
transculturalism.
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One of the key aspects of multiculturalism is to completely deny everything I have said
so far in this section. That is, multiculturalism is founded on the idea that cultures are so
utterly different from each other and have no true commonalities that true
understanding of one culture by another is nigh-impossible. If this is true, then
tolerance is truly the only possibility. However, if each and every culture is a product of
our human universals, or human instincts, only variations on each of those themes, then
there is no reason we could not come to understand each other in some pretty
fundamental ways.
The reason postmodern/postcolonial thinkers moved away from universalism is not
exactly arbitrary, however. There were good historical reasons for doing so. In the early
part of the 20th century (and earlier), universalism was associated with a Westerndominant world view. That is, Western culture was considered to be universal, meaning
that other cultures were “wrong variations” on it. This was part of an Us-Good, OtherBad dualism that has a tendency to dominate human thought. With this kind of dualism,
the good should certainly dominate the bad, and Western culture should certainly
prevail over other cultures (we’ll leave the problems with the very idea of “Western
culture” for Section IV). Postcolonial thinkers rightly reacted against such notions, but
they did so by rejecting the very idea that there could be commonalities among cultures.
This might have been a necessary corrective at the time, but it was nevertheless an error.
It is simply incorrect that there are no similarities among cultures, that there are no
such things as cultural universals. If multiculturalism is necessarily based on this idea of
a lack of cultural universals, it too is simply wrong. However, we do not have to throw
out the good with the bad; we can learn both the good lessons and the bad lessons of
postcolonial multiculturalism and both affirm the importance of other cultures while
understanding that there is a commonality among all cultures in the form of human
instincts that get expressed as cultural universals at the social level. In other words,
postmodern multiculturalist cultural essentialism is as wrong as the biological
essentialism it replaced.
Post-modernism, an intellectual movement based on the work of thinkers like
Michael Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and others, rejected the idea that there is or
could be anything like objective truth, particularly in the social sciences and
humanities. All such “facts” are really social constructs and are therefore open to
challenge. The principle that there was any sort of objective social reality that could,
with effort, be ascertained was rejected. This belief certainly has implications for
whether or not we can understand other cultures, or indeed anything in any of the
social sciences.
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IV.
On Culture and Kitsch
In his novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera defines “kitsch” as “a
world without shit.” In art, it is fundamentally anti-beauty, because it rejects complexity,
the possibility of a multiplicity of meanings, and the shades and shadows that make
distinctions possible. Ideologues inevitably reject beauty for kitsch. More, I would argue
that kitsch is the contemporary source of most of our cultural conflicts.
In the case of multiculturalism, kitsch allows us to romanticize the Other (and
ourselves—the myth of the evil oppressor is itself a romanticized myth). In “Race,
Multiculturalism and Democracy,” Robert Gooding-Williams (1998) observes that
current forms of Afrocentrism are in fact “kitsch,” precisely because they
oversimplify the various African cultures into a false homogeneous “African
culture.” Contemporary multiculturalists tend to overlook negative elements of
other cultures to try to elevate those cultures. But when multiculturalists engage in
this kind of kitsch, they actually undermine multiculturalism because they are
homogenizing heterogeneous cultures into an idealized form without distinctions.
More, it confirms the dominant “Western” view that there are large, homogeneous
blocks of “African culture,” “Hispanic culture,” “Asian culture,” “Native American
culture,” and “Western culture.” The fact is that in a real sense there is no more a
Western culture than there is an African or a Hispanic or an Asian or a Native
American culture. France is not Germany is not England; Mali is not South Africa is
not Ethiopia; Mexico is not Chile is not the Dominican Republic; China is not India
is not Japan; Cherokees are not Aztecs are not Wari’. And in many of these
countries, there are subcultures that complicate things further. To think of India as
any kind of single culture is simply ridiculous.
But even if we just deal with dominant, contemporary cultures (remembering that
ancient Greek culture is not modern Greek culture or that the Medieval Mali culture
represented in Sundiata is not modern Mali culture), there are too many to teach
everyone enough about them to develop an appreciation for them all. But do we
have to? We again turn to Gooding-Williams:
In multicultural America, multicultural public education is a good that
promotes mutual understanding across cultural differences, thereby fostering
and strengthening citizens’ capacities for democratic deliberation. In essence,
multicultural education is a form of pedagogy whereby students study the
histories and cultures of differently cultured fellow citizens, many of whose
identities have a composite, multicultural character. More exactly, it is a form
of cross-cultural hermeneutical dialogue, and therefore a way of entering into
conversation with those histories and cultures. By disseminating the cultural
capital of cross-cultural knowledge, multicultural education can cultivate
citizens’ abilities to “reverse perspectives.” By facilitating mutual
understanding, it can help them to shape shared vocabularies for
understanding their moral and cultural identities and for finding common
ground in their deliberations. (31)
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Thus, one does not have to learn about every culture to gain from a multicultural
education, because “By strengthening a student’s ability to reverse perspectives,
multicultural education may bolster her disposition to engage the selfunderstandings of differently cultured others, even if the particulars of her
multicultural education have not involved an engagement with the cultures of
precisely those others” (31, italics in original). This kind of multiculturalism
promoted by Gooding-Williams promotes the transition of information in the
forming of beliefs and ideas between individuals and across cultures. The dominant
form of multiculturalism we have today limits information, and hence,
understanding. This is what makes contemporary multiculturalism kitsch.
What Gooding-Williams proposes can be realized because humans as a species are
capable of empathy. When we see someone get hurt, MRI scans show the same
regions of the brain become active in us as become active when we ourselves are
hurt. More than that, MRI scans also show reading about someone getting punched
on the arm has the same effect. When we read a novel, we empathize with the
characters in that novel, learn to see the world as they see it. This happens because
we empathize with those specific characters – and we experience what they
experience. Thus, empathy is created. From this, we can conclude that it is not
enough to simply become familiar with a culture (or big-block kitsch culture) in a
broad sense; rather, one needs to become personally familiar with the culture in a
way that can only be achieved (if one is not from that culture) through literature.
As every fiction writer is taught, one does not write universal stories by being vague
and abstract – one writes universal stories by being detailed and specific. Some
nondescript individual doing something somewhere is not universalizing – but a
red-headed Scotsman taking care of his family in the Scottish highlands is. When
you see him taking care of his family, interacting with his family, one comes to
understand, "Hey, he's a lot like me. My family does similar things." Thus does one
come to empathize with the unknown other, to embody that character and come to
know the subtle differences through the deep similarities. It is through this
empathy-creation though experiencing other cultures that will allow us to move
beyond divisive multiculturalism and into a more unity-in-variety, variety-in-unity
transculturalism because each person will themselves learn to become both
culturally unified and varied.
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But for this to happen, we must also reject the multiculturalist idea that one should
not “appropriate” the cultural works of others. While in the West art has for several
centuries now been considered to be an individualistic pursuit, multiculturalism has
collectivized art into their various cultures (not their actual cultures, but rather their
kitsch cultures). It is not uncommon to hear the argument that one cannot truly
understand art from another culture (which is really just a variation on the
multiculturalists’ argument that one cannot really understand another culture), and
if one did claim one was influenced, then one was guilty of “appropriation” – as
though being influenced somehow took something away from the “appropriated”
culture. But how is this really much more than a “polite” way of insisting on
racial/ethnic purity? While one cannot argue in favor of a pure German art without
sounding like a racist, with multiculturalism one can argue against being influenced
by art from any culture that was not German on the grounds that one was
insensitively “misappropriating” the art of that other culture. The ideology of nonappropriation is profoundly anti-spontaneous order and anti-liberal, and actually
serves to limit the ability of those not part of the culture in question to experience it,
and thus to gain from exposure to it.
In doing this, one does not have to assert a positive separation of the races; rather,
one can assert a negative “we don’t want to appropriate their culture, so it can
remain pure.” Of course, if their culture is pure, so too is your own. One can further
mask this fact by running down one’s own culture. The end result is egalitarian in
nature: we make all cultures equal, as much by lifting them up as by tearing
ourselves down. Their radical separation, though, also keeps them pure. This is a
perverse version of what W.E.B. Dubois, in The Souls of Black Folks, imagined when
he thought the races could achieve equality by affirming their own cultures more
clearly, so that each could then learn something from the other. Except where
Dubois thought we could and should learn from each other, postmodernists insist
such learning cannot take place. Thus one is left with radical racial/ethnic
separations into a variety of collectives.
Du Bois seems to see individuals as being in part informed by their group
membership(s) – cultural, ethic/racial, ideological, etc. – with the understanding
that all groups are equal and have something to teach each other. For Du Bois, this
attitude that we are equal and must learn from and teach each other is what unifies
us into a human brotherhood. We thus learn to be more human and more humane.
Not by rejecting our group memberships, but by simultaneously embracing them
and not just tolerating, but appreciating, others in different groups, with different
ideas, and different world views.
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Du Bois sees each race as equal, and as being in a position to equally educate each
other. In this sense, he would oppose the current conception of multiculturalism
that treats all other cultures as equal, but degrades Western culture. Du Bois clearly
loves Western culture, and believes it can teach the other cultures much, just as he
believes the other cultures have much to teach those who practice Western culture.
This co-equal collectivism leads to treating others as being part of a human
brotherhood – as co-teachers of each other. But note well that Du Bois rejects such
notions as cultural imperialism or cultural appropriation. He wants us to
appropriate. He wants us to learn from and teach each other. In this sense, perhaps
Du Bois would embrace what Frederick Turner termed "natural classicism," in
which artists learn from other cultures as much as they learn from their own, to
create a new world art. Indeed, du Bois, Gooding-Wiliams, and Turner are good
places to start if we want to move away from divisive multiculturalism and embrace
rather a healthy transculturalism that simultaneously celebrates diversity and
doesn’t shy away from criticism and change.
Humans are not blank slates, but neither are we purely genetically determined; we
are, rather, poised between the two states (the place of maximum creativity,
maximum freedom, the far-from-equilibrium state)i. It is for this reason that, in the
end, I recommend a unity-in-variety and variety-in-unity approach (Francis
Hutcheson’s definition of beauty), in which we come to recognize that we have a
common humanity, but that we are individuated through our social interactions,
including those within a particular culture and/or subculture. Thus, we can in fact
understand each other, while at the same time celebrating others’ differences. We
can, as Dubois dreamed, learn much from each other. And that is possible precisely
because of our underlying common humanity.
In other words, kitsch is overcome by true education about the Other, which can only
take place with dialogue. As each culture develops its own individual identity, we see the
emergence of variety, of pluralism; yet as each culture engages in dialogue with other
cultures, we see the emergence of unity, of finding common cause in learning from each
other. Our biological unity as a species gives rise to a psychological unity that
nevertheless gives rise to a variety of cultures which are in constant flux and can learn
from each other even as they remain differentiated. This is the essence, it seems to me,
of transculturalism.
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V.
On Culture and Beauty
There is evidence that complex systems of all kinds, including social systems, are at
their most complex and healthiest when they are heterogeneous. As Sobel et al
(2010) observe, pluralism in world views, cultural perspectives, education, etc. can
all contribute to the creation of healthy organizations and social orders under the
right institutional conditions. On the other hand, institutions that set groups against
each other lead to balkanization and outbreaks of hostility. Under such institutional
conditions, heterogeneous orders become perverse (as we have seen in the breakup
of Yugoslavia and in the genocide that took place in Rwanda), while under good
institutional conditions, the benefits of heterogeneity become very pronounced
(consider the economic wealth of highly heterogeneous places like New York,
California, or Texas vs. the relative economic poverty of highly homogeneous places
like Mississippi, West Virginia, or Arkansas).
Francis Hutcheson, who was a teacher of Adam Smith, defined something as being
beautiful if "there is Uniformity amidst Variety" (An Inquiry into the Original of Our
Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, 28). We can apply this definition not only to objects,
including music and the other arts, but to natural objects and to social systems. Indeed,
to entire cultures. Beautiful works of art and literature help us to both understand and
live well within spontaneous social orders, to understand our own and other cultures.
They can thus be used to transform us from monocultural to multicultural to
transcultural. The monocultural society is one of pure uniformity, of course, and
multiculturalism is variety that strongly pushes for such strong divisions as to create
uniformity within each culture (it is thus a kind of radical, atomistic individualism
applied to the cultural level). Thus, neither is a beautiful vision of the human world.
Only if we can develop a world view that accepts the unity and the variety of human
cultures will we develop a vision of human cultures and of human culture as beautiful.
Both beautiful objects and cultures are ordered, evolutionary (changing over time), rulebased, simultaneously digital and analog, generative and creative (as Elaine Scarry also
argues of beauty), scale-free hierarchies (what Frederick Turner calls heterarchies in
The Culture of Hope) in structure, patterned/rhythmic, unified in their multiplicity,
synergistic, novel, irreducible, unpredictable, coherent, and involve feedback or
reflexivity. All beautiful objects, including cultures, are information-generating systems.
Each of these elements are necessarily elements of each and every culture and constitute
the very health of those cultures. Cultures have always naturally interacted and traded
information about each other; the multiculturalist push to prevent such interactions
under fear of cultural appropriation is thus an attempt to prevent this self-organization,
the feedback and reflexivity necessary for self-organization, from taking place.
14
If one of the problems with understanding cultures is that they are more complex than
we are, we being nodes within the cultural network, and a less complex entity cannot
fully understand a system more complex than itself (Hayek, The Sensory Order, 185),
then understanding the relationship between cultures and the nature of beauty
(especially in regards to the internal structures of beautiful things, and how they interact
to create the beautiful whole) could help us to understand the nature of cultures and
their natural interactions. More, learning to better appreciate and understand beauty –
whether in nature, cultures, or in cultural works such as art, music, literature, etc. –
should help each of us to learn how to better live within each of our cultures and to not
just co-exist alongside, but to positively contribute to each one’s health and growth. That
is the very essence of transculturalism.
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VI.
Meanwhile, Back in the Real World…
It is one thing to talk about these things and to analyze the situation, but the question
remains as to whether we can actually achieve transculturalism. The fact of the matter is
that multiculturalism was hardly an instant hit, either, but it has managed to become
the dominant paradigm. It has become so by becoming established in our universities,
which are now the current creators of our cultural creators, our artists and philosophers.
Postmodernism, postcolonialism, and multiculturalism began in the universities and
have spread through our cultures from those universities, permeating our cultures to
such a degree that, for the most part, we simply accept that we should respect other
cultures. That is the good which has come from it. However, the promulgators of
multiculturalism continue to press for the radical vision of multiculturalism which I
have generally outlined throughout this paper. Respecting another culture does not,
however, mean we must accept every element of that culture (I would include female
circumcision as one of many cultural practices I do not feel myself in any way obliged to
respect) or to excuse them, even if it may strongly suggest that we have no business
forcing a society to stop a cultural practice we abhor. Further, it does not mean each
culture should cut itself off from every other culture and refuse to learn about or learn
from those cultures. That approach is incredibly unhealthy and will lead, as it seems to
be leading, to cultural strife. This is becoming increasingly evident in Europe in
particular.
The multiculturalist paradigm has left Europe completely paralyzed. The only
“solutions” being offered seem to come from various nationalists and constitutes a
completely untenable and undesirable closure of the borders and support for a pure
monoculture that only ever existed in the kitsch dreams of the political right. And yet,
these groups are finding increasing popularity in their anti-immigrant, nationalist
rhetoric. The popularity of Donald Trump’s rhetoric, leading to his becoming the
nominee of the Republican Party to run for the President of the United States, shows
these concerns are more widespread than just Europe.
And yet, a great many Republicans have openly opposed Trump and have even given
open support for the Libertarian Party nominee, Gary Johnson – mostly because of
Trump’s position on immigration and multiculturalism. This only shows that America’s
“right-wing” party is sufficiently multiculturalist as to oppose a nominee as nationalist
as Trump seems to be. It is therefore not likely that right-wing nationalism will find
strong roots in the U.S. Further, most Europeans aren’t likely to truly support rightwing nationalism, but rather to continue to support multiculturalism, even if it leads to
confused inaction.
So where does that leave us? Do we have to choose only between postmodern leftist
multiculturalism leading to inaction from the fear of offending anyone and right-wing
nationalism leading to varying degrees of purges and purification?
16
A way out of this quandary is suggested by the dynamical psychosociology of Clare
Graves. European countries are mostly at the egalitarian level of social development,
which is the source of its postmodern multiculturalism. The political right are at the
authoritative or even empire/heroic level of social development – a level they ironically
share with most of the immigrants they wish to eject and reject. However, there is
fortunately an increasing number of people at the integrationist level of psychology, and
even at the holistic level. People at this level understand that the postmodern paradigm
is insufficient and is beginning to unravel as its contradictions begin to overwhelm the
societies in which it is dominant. They are beginning to understand that those
contradictions are in fact leading many to abandon leftist internationalism for rightwing nationalism, and that this is a natural result of the contradictions of the leftist
world view. But it need not be the only result. One doesn’t have to regress to a less
complex psychological or social state.
What the integrationists are beginning to feel out, and the holists are more fully
developing, is the idea of transculturalism. The transculturalist agrees with the
multiculturalist that we should respect other cultures’ ways of doing things and not
insist that our way of doing this or that is better and theirs worse, but they disagree with
the multiculturalists that this means we should never criticize or that we should accept
anything and everything just because someone uses their culture as an excuse. To do
this, we have to understand the underpinnings of culture in human universals. We have
to understand that human moral systems are in fact universal in nature, and that many
of the differences stem from where a person is on Graves’ emergent levels rather than
truly particular individual cultures’ differences. When we do that, we come to
understand that the definition of “murder” for example is not remotely culturally
determined because every single culture on earth throughout all history defines and
defined murder as the purposeful killing of a fellow human being. All so-called
exceptions stem from the recognition that there are individuals and groups who a given
culture do not recognize as fellow human beings. It may be as simple as “anyone not in
our tribe is not a human being,” or it may be as complex as an involved ritual that
transforms the person from a human being to not-a-human-being. The Aztecs did just
that with their ritual sacrifices, and the U.S. does it with our court system putting people
on death row.
Understanding that the prohibition of murder is universal, but the cultural expressions
of that universal varies, and varies in a predictable way based on the psychosocial level
of complexity in accordance to Gravesean theory, provides us with a deeper
understanding of both murder as a moral prohibition and what “cultural variation” truly
means. This can be applied to any variety of cultural elements.
17
Frederick Turner and Ernst Pöppel (Turner 1985) give the example of the fact that every
culture has/had poetry, their poems are broken up into lines, and those lines are on
average 3 seconds long. They point out that the auditory short term memory is optimally
3 seconds long as well. This is surely more than mere coincidence, especially given that
throughout the vast majority of human history poems have almost always been intended
to be memorized—not for the least reason that in pre-literate cultures that’s the only
way to pass literary works down through the generations. As they both point out,
repetition of patterns of varying kinds also contributed to memorization. With the
advent of widespread literacy, many of the oral/auditory needs of poetry have been lost,
and so we have seen the rise of a variety of kinds of poems that challenge such things as
line lengths, regular rhythms, and other kinds of patterns—but with that rise we have
also seen a complete loss of interest in poetry from the average person. With one
exception: popular songs. Of course, these popular songs continue to have these original
elements, and they also must be memorized by the singer, and are often memorized by
the fans. In any case, we see here a biological foundation in our auditory three second
short term memory giving rise to a universal feature in poetry from a variety of cultures.
It has been fashionable of late to focus on the cultural differences among poetries, but
too often doing so has masked the fact that under those differences are a variety of
universal features that clearly mark certain kinds of language acts as poetry. A
transcultural poetry would of course be one in which these universal features are utilized
if not emphasized. And it would simultaneously respect the fact that different cultures
have a variety of different poetries whose forms and structures differ from others, but
whose differences do not make them better or worse. Of course, the fact that ghazals and
haikus are written in English and a variety of other languages than Persian or Japanese
suggests that many of our poets have begun the journey toward transculturalism. It
would hardly be the first time poets beat everyone else to the goal.
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VII. Conclusion
For the longest time we have sought to ensure greater tolerance for our fellow human
beings. We are told we should tolerate other races, other ethnicities, other genders,
other sexual orientations, other ways of living and of thinking. And this was important
once upon a time (and still is for some people), when the knee-jerk response to
difference was to burn the person at the stake. When that's the natural response, then
getting people to simply be willing to tolerate other people's existence is a move in the
right direction. That is the idea behind multiculturalism, and we should be grateful for
the work they have done to move the world in the right direction.
But we should not be satisfied with tolerance. I don't want to be tolerated. And neither
do you. To be tolerated means to be put up with. You live over there and let me pretend
you don't exist. You do the same for me. Live and let live. But let’s be honest, who wants
to live such isolated lives? One of the consequences of multiculturalism has been
increased divisions among human beings. If we cannot truly understand another
culture, perhaps we cannot truly understand another person, either. Even if they are
members of our culture.
No, tolerance is hardly enough. I want to be accepted. I want "be yourself" to be meant
literally, and when I am myself, to have that self appreciated. I want to be enjoyed and
loved and I want people to be excited by my presence.
And so do you.
Tolerance will only get you so far. When my parents tolerated my interests rather than
encouraging them, they didn’t harm me, they didn’t hold me back, but they didn’t quite
provide me the support needed to flourish. I had to provide most of that soil to myself,
even if a few fertilized it along the way.
While the tolerant simply get out of the way, it’s far, far better to have people love you
for all you are. And that is also the difference between multiculturalism and
transculturalism. The multiculturalist creates the space for toleration, but what happens
when people start to realize that toleration simply isn’t enough? That it’s hardly a
human way to live and interact with people. It’s too isolating, too anti-social and even
anti-understanding of the Other. The reactions around the world have not been
encouraging. We are seeing reversion to pre-liberal attitudes toward those from other
cultures. This has come about in no small part as people have discovered that you
cannot simply tolerate each and every thing found in another culture. There may in fact
be some pretty despicable elements of any given culture. Multiculturalism doesn’t give
us the tools to deal with that fact. And thus we see in Europe the rise of an intolerant
right alongside a toothless multicultural left apologizing for everything and anything.
Which only fuels the right even more.
19
The promise of transculturalism lies in the move from tolerance to acceptance. We need
to find joy in others’ cultures and enjoy those cultures. Those people will be more likely
to believe us if we equally find joy in our own culture and celebrate that culture on an
equal par with all the other cultures of the world. We need to be open to learning from
other cultures, and that can only be done if we reject the notion that by learning from
another culture we are somehow appropriating that culture. And more, we need to learn
about actual other cultures and not just lump incredibly dissimilar cultures as Indian,
Japanese, and Iraqi cultures into “Asian Culture” or Mali, Zulu, or Tutsi cultures into
“African Culture.” Recognizing and celebrating those differences while simultaneously
understanding the underlying similarities among those cultures as products of fellow
human beings is the soul of transculturalism.
In complex polycellular organisms, a single set of genes give rise to a variety of cells with
different functions that work together to create a single body that in turn keeps those
cells healthy and ensure the passage of those underlying genes. Transculturalism
proposes nothing less on the level of culture: a single set of human universals give rise to
a variety of cultures that (could) work together to create a single transculture that in
turn keeps those underlying cultures healthy and ensures the passage of those cultures
on to future generations. In the same way that each person is individuated in his or her
social environment even as each contributes to the structures of that social
environment, each culture would be individuated within the transculture even as each
contributes to the structures of that transculture.
What will that transculture look like? Who knows? It will have emergent properties that
will make its structure unknowable from its parts. But it cannot emerge without
communication among the cultures, without the kind of learning among cultures duBois
dreamed would one day take place. Toleration does not allow communication.
Appreciation does. And that’s why we need to learn to appreciate each other and each
other’s cultures. Only then can we move from kitsch to beauty.
i
Avastliteratureaddresseswhatisanincreasinglysoundscientificconsensusthathumansareaproductofboth
nurtureandnature(e.g.,Pinker2002).
20
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