Cultures and Cassoulets

Crossposted  to The Crusty Polemicist

“Two thousand years of Judeo-Christianity  have not obscured the fact that pagan thought has not yet disappeared, even though it has often been blurred, stifled or persecuted by monotheistic religions and their secular offshoots.”

                        Alain De Benoist

People here in the US don’t speak much about “culture” anymore, not in any real sense. To speak these days about things like “a culture” or “a people,” and to demand that such things be taken seriously, is to invite smirks at best, anxious frowns at worst. I believe that the new century will contain certain centrifugal forces that will enable us – force us – to take these things seriously again.

The US has always comforted itself with the myth of the “melting pot.” What we actually have – what we have always had, if the truth is to be told – is more like the southern French dish called “Cassoulet.” A large, bubbling pot full of chunks of disparate, bizarrely matched ingredients. When people speak of “an” American culture, they are willfully insisting on the myth of the smoothly mixed “melting pot” rather than the uncomfortable reality of the American cassoulet. American culture as such does not exist. In place of the culture is the shared assertion that “We are all Americans!” From the perspective of authentic cultures, this is a non-statement. It simply says, “We believe in the same ideas.” So saying, “I am an American” means nothing more than “I accept the same propositions that you do.” In a nation where even the illusion of such unity of beliefs and values lies shattered on the ground, this entire model collapses – and the US has nothing authentic with which to replace it.

Once the chimera of “shared ideas and values” is seen for what it is, we are confronted with a Bizarro World free-jazz interpretation of an authentic culture. By the time Americans’ ancestral cultures have been fed into the maw of the great American degradation machine and shat out the other end, they are nothing more than a collection of Disney Land “small world” artifacts bearing no more resemblance to authentic cultures than “Saint Patty’s Day” bears a resemblance to my ancestral Gaelic culture that it purports to “celebrate.” The idea that a nation can simply manufacture a culture at will is not only the height of hubris, it also misses the point.

With the idea of “an” American culture exposed for the myth that it has always been, perhaps it is time to rediscover and renew our faith in the authentic cultures of the ancestors we left behind. Not so that we can “celebrate our heritage” in some typically shallow, mercantile little ritual of consumption. But rather so that we can have a true understanding of who we are and where we are from. As the “American idea” vanishes into smoke and faerie dust, this may be the only thing we have to hang on to, the only firm ground on which we can stand.

When I drive along the shore of the Mediterranean from Barolo to Monaco to Nice to Provence to the scrublands of Languedoc to the small rocky beach at Banyuls-sur-Mer, regions where the locals are once again demanding that their homelands be called by their true names – Catalonia, Occitania, Savoy – I rejoice in the multitude of alive, vital, authentic cultures. When I drive from mad King Ludwig’s castle across the Rhine and into the heart of wine country in regions that the locals are once again proud to call Bayern and Alsace and Bourgogne, I rejoice. Any place where an authentic culture grounded in an authentic people survives and even occasionally thrives in this flat, dull, monotonous, pasteurized, globalized, Disneyfied world, I rejoice in them. And I salute them.

9 comments

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  1. Most smarting comment:

    Me, depreciatingly: “I’m an American.  We are uncivilized.”

    Ex, snidely: “No, you’re not uncivilized.  You merely have no culture.”

    By the standards of those places — most places — this is a good critique.  But here’s the thing, I think — there is authentic american culture.  Henry David Thoreau, Emerson and Robert Johnson, Muir, Gershwin…but our authenticity is raw as the smell of piss in a NY subway, brash and founded in the requirement we find the meaning to sustain life in the face of half-understood, half-discarded traditions on one hand and our tendency to homogenize and conform, on the other.  

    And yes, I understand how the paragraph above could be construed as missing your point.  I guess I believe that authenticity — coming from something true — is something that Americans are forced, to some degree, to invent.  Some of us — most of us do it badly, and can the stinking result in identical containers.  But when we do it well, it transmits, it informs, it is, genuinely and authentically, part of our culture.

    • RiaD on October 22, 2008 at 16:07

    containing O sooo much truth!

    The US has always comforted itself with the myth of the “melting pot.” What we actually have – what we have always had, if the truth is to be told – is more like the southern French dish called “Cassoulet.” A large, bubbling pot full of chunks of disparate, bizarrely matched ingredients.

    In a nation where even the illusion of such unity of beliefs and values lies shattered on the ground, this entire model collapses – and the US has nothing authentic with which to replace it.

    thank you crusty

    ♥~

  2. a whole lot.  Over there, we can see a bit of sausage (that’s boudin, representing Cajun culture), and over here there’s some beans (i.e., jazz, one of the few great American cultural inventions), and…you get my point.

    Nice essay, cp.

    • RiaD on October 23, 2008 at 00:02

    but i found the quote your essay brought to mind:

    Europe was created by history.

    America was created by philosophy. ~Margaret Thatcher

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