>From The Age http://www.theage.com.au/daily/990310/news/news27.html Wednesday 10 March 1999 A culture of easy criticism By SALMAN RUSHDIE A COUPLE of years ago a British literary festival staged a public debate on the motion that ``it is the duty of every European to resist American culture''. Along with two American journalists (one of whom was Sidney Blumenthal, now more famous as a Clinton aide and impeachment witness), I opposed the motion. I'm happy to report that we won, capturing roughly 60per cent of the audience's vote. But it was an odd sort of victory. My American co-panellists were surprised by the strength of the audience's anti-Americanism - after all, 40 per cent of the crowd had voted for the motion. Sidney, noting that ``American culture'' as represented by American armed forces had liberated Europe from Nazism not all that many years ago, was puzzled by the audience's apparent lack of gratitude. And there was a residual feeling that the case for resistance was actually pretty strong. Since that day, the debate about cultural globalisation and its military-political sidekick, intervention, has continued to intensify and anti-American sentiment is, if anything, on the increase. In most people's heads, globalisation has come to mean the worldwide triumph of Nike, the Gap and MTV. Confusingly, we want these goods and services when we behave as consumers, but with our cultural hats on we have begun to deplore their omnipresence. On the merits of intervention, even greater confusion reigns. We don't seem to know if we want a world policeman or not. If the ``international community'', which these days is little more than a euphemism for the United States, fails to intervene promptly in Rwanda, Bosnia, Kosovo, it is excoriated for that failure. Elsewhere, it is criticised just as vehemently when it does intervene: when American bombs fall on Iraq or when American agents assist in the capture of the Kurdish leader Abdullah Ocalan. Clearly, those of us who shelter under the pax Americana are deeply ambiguous about it, and the US will no doubt continue to be surprised by the level of the world's ingratitude. The globalising power of American culture is opposed by an improbable alliance that includes everyone from cultural-relativist liberals to hard-line fundamentalists, with all manner of pluralists and individualists, to say nothing of flag-waving nationalists and splintering sectarians, in between. Much ecological concern is being expressed about the crisis in biodiversity, the possibility that a fifth or more of the earth's species may soon become extinct. To some, globalisation is an equivalent social catastrophe, with equally alarming implications for the survival of true cultural diversity, of the world's precious localness: the Indianness of India, the Frenchness of France. Amid this din of global defensiveness, little thought is given to some of the most important questions raised by a phenomenon that, like it or not, isn't going away any time soon. For instance: do cultures actually exist as separate, pure, defensible entities? Is not melange, adulteration, impurity, pick'n'mix at the heart of the idea of the modern, and hasn't it been that way for most of this all-shook-up century? Doesn't the idea of pure cultures, in urgent need of being kept free from alien contamination, lead us inexorably towards apartheid, towards ethnic cleansing, towards the gas chamber? Or, to put it another way: are there other universals besides international conglomerates and the interests of superpowers? And if by chance there were a universal value that might, for the sake of argument, be called ``freedom'', whose enemies - tyranny, bigotry, intolerance, fanaticism - were the enemies of us all; and if this ``freedom'' were discovered to exist in greater quantity in the countries of the West than anywhere else on earth; and if, in the world as it actually exists, rather than in some unattainable Utopia, the authority of the US were the best current guarantor of that ``freedom'', then might it not follow that to oppose the spread of American culture would be to take up arms against the wrong foe? By agreeing on what we are against, we discover what we are for. Andre Malraux believed that the next millennium must be the age of religion. I would say rather that it must be the age in which we finally grow out of our need for religion. But to cease to believe in our gods is not the same thing as commencing to believe in nothing. There are fundamental freedoms to fight for, and it will not do to doom the terrorised women of Afghanistan or of the circumcision-happy lands of Africa by calling their oppression their ``culture''. And of course it is America's duty not to abuse its pre-eminence, and it is our right to criticise such abuses when they happen - when, for example, innocent factories in Sudan are bombed or Iraqi civilians are pointlessly killed. But perhaps we, too, need to rethink our easy condemnations. Sneakers, burgers, blue jeans and music videos aren't the enemy. If the young people of Iran now insist on rock concerts, who are we to criticise their cultural contamination? Out there are real tyrants to defeat. Let's keep our eyes on the prize. Salman Rushdie is the author of The Satanic Verses. His column appears monthly in The Age. ~~~~~~~~~~~~ A<>E<>R The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes. -Marcel Proust + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority. -Thomas Huxley + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Forwarded as information only; no endorsement to be presumed + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, this material is distributed without charge or profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving this type of information for non-profit research and educational purposes only.
