Culture is like that. It’s what we humans assimilate, largely unconsciously, from the time we’re born, with no real context for understanding it until we begin to look at other cultures. Ask an average four year old child why it’s wrong to lie and they’ll have no frigging clue about questions of epistemology, about existential questions of “truth”, or the finer points of ethical conduct – but they damn sure know they shouldn’t lie. I had kids young (relatively speaking), for my generation. I raised four daughters, my youngest now eighteen, and I’m (only) forty-six. As a consequence, my peers tend to have younger kids now and I’ll occasionally get asked questions about raising the little knee-biters. It came to me after number two or three is that for the first eight or nine years, you’re teaching your kids the rules. For the next eight or nine, you’re explaining the exceptions. Hopefully in the last half is where you teach them ethics, that is, how to choose between occasionally competing moral obligations, but that’s a larger subject for another time.
Merriam Webster online has the simple definition for culture as “the beliefs, customs, arts, etc., of a particular society, group, place, or time.” I think the word “beliefs” is true enough for the definition, but I think there’s an even simpler formulation and I want to use it to make a finer point about culture. I define culture as the totality of our collective values. Value itself is a bit of a loaded term, but I think the distinction from “beliefs” is important. People may or may not believe all kinds of silly shit in a given culture, but any particular belief, even one held by a majority, doesn’t really have any kind of impact until a culture gives it value. We had chia pets, for example, but its cultural significance is a non-factor for my purposes. Until a significant enough portion of a given culture decides that a belief is significant enough to be worthy of preservation and/or emulation, it’s a fad. Nothing more.
Many people think Saturday Night Live is funny; many others do not. Regardless of where you fall on that dividing line, it has done well enough to have become a kind of cultural touchstone, a veritable institution. Lorne Michaels has churned out a pretty impressive collection of talent: from Belushi, Murray, Akroyd et al., to Eddie Murphy, Dana Carvey, Christopher Guest, to Kristin Wiig, Will Ferrell, Jimmy Fallon, Tina Fey, Amy Poehler and on and on. Somehow, despite everyone always complaining about how it isn’t anywhere near as funny as it used to be, it remains a staple of American culture. In sum, regardless of how any particular individual feels about SNL, or what we could measure beyond ratings, SNL remains very much a valued part of our culture – at least enough that it justifies its existence commercially. It is a successful business, so far as I can tell, and it apparently drew solid enough ratings to be able to garner advertising revenue sufficient to pay for itself – as well as launching an unprecedented array of cultural icons.
SNL is simply a concrete example of a larger cultural phenomenon: the sketch comedy show. That idea had its origins before SNL and even television, going back to radio, and even Vaudeville before that. You could continue to broaden your scope in looking at SNL’s cultural origins to simply examining the cultural value placed on comedy down through the ages, or of satire. These concepts themselves are nothing more than ancient ideas, passed down to us from long-deceased progenitors if Darwin is indeed correct – and he appears to have the clubhouse lead so far as I can tell.
There are other interesting cultural aspects to SNL. In Living Colour was proof that the sketch comedy idea was culturally resonant for both blacks and whites, not that this should have been – or should be – a surprise. It’s just that in its earliest days, television catered to the audience that watched it – and that likely meant the audience that could afford to watch it, as in, those who could afford a television. Blacks, who were poorer in larger percentages than poor whites, probably didn’t own televisions in significant enough numbers for it to be resonant and advertisers weren’t trying to attract black consumers. Advertisers buy commercial time for particular audiences – the ones they think can be convinced to buy their products, which means they need people with disposable income who can (a) afford a television, and (b) afford the products they’re pitching. Hence the early “whitewashing” of television. I note these things without any judgment, but merely as important ideas in evaluating and understanding culture as broadly as possible, particularly here in the United States.
Unlike the vast majority of the world, our Country has had, at the heart of its experiment, an allowance for different cultures to arise and flourish, without any need for government approval. The First Amendment is unlike virtually any other founding government charter or constitution, anywhere else in the world. Even in England and on the Continent, from whence the Enlightenment ideas arose, there is not the kind of liberty of expression that exists here in the United States. Because of that simple fact, we enjoy a proliferation of cultures here within our own borders.
While my socialist friends always point to the Scandinavian countries as some kind of possible proof of “successful socialism,” I (first) ignore the temptation to point out that this is complete bullshit, but then, instead, simply accept the premise and then ask them what impact they think the near uniformity of the people there has on their claim? That is, do they believe the vastly different cultures, races, and languages that we have here render the claim by analogy perhaps ill-considered at all? I usually get a blank stare – or a handwaving gesture, as if I don’t know what I’m talking about and I’m making excuses in order not to concede the point.
Iceland, as just the most usual example, is a candidate for most homogeneous country on the planet. North Korea might possibly “win” out, depending upon what metrics one uses – ethnicity, language, religion, law, and politics (including issues of immigration), just to consider a few ways in which culture can be “fractured” or, on the flip side of the coin, deemed “homogeneous.” Most of the Scandinavian countries rank high in the homogeneity in these metrics: Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark are all places where there isn’t anything even remotely approaching the kind of free-market culturalism that exists here in the United States. And while this might seem to be a relatively trivial matter, it isn’t. Socialism is tribalism; that is the nature of the philosophy. It depends – and needs – a high-degree of uniformity that can exist only in very culturally uniform societies to work at all. (I’ll come back to the reasons why later on, but for now we can move past it).
These ideas about culture first began percolating to me when I joined one of the most well-preserved cultures in the United States, since before the birth of the Country itself: the United States Marine Corps (oo-fuckin’-rah). The Marine Corps’ began in a tavern in Philadelphia in 1775. That EVERY SINGLE MARINE can tell you this two-hundred-forty years later should begin to paint a picture about the Marine Corps’ culture and preservation of it. History is the name we give to the transmission of culture through time. One of my favorite anecdotes about this comes from the Marine Officer’s Guide, a staple book that most Marine Officers buy as new Lieutenants – or even before – and read, cover-to-cover. It may be required reading at The Basic School, but I don’t remember. And, as if to further illustrate my claim about the Marine Corps, I should point out that The Basic School (or TBS, as it is known) is the place where the Marine Corps sends every single officer, regardless of what Military Occupational Specialty you might eventually have, be it Supply Officer or Tanker or Pilot, and everyone goes, both male and female. It’s 26 weeks of basic infantry officer training, plus all of the indoctrination/brainwashing/propagandizing* that would make a Soviet TASS editor proud. It’s called “Customs and Traditions,” if I recall correctly.
*I joke, but look at something like this if you think the people who run the Marine Corps haven’t given some thought as to how to create and preserve its unique culture.
A brilliant look at this as a larger human phenomenon was done by PBS about thirty years ago, in a series called, simply, “WAR.” It was a television series narrated by Gwynne Dyer and had different sub-chaptered examinations, individual shows, dedicated to the overall discussion of “WAR.” The one I found most compelling was the piece entitled “Anybody’s Son Will Do” (and by the fucking all-mighty miracle that is the Youtubez and the InterWebz, I can link right to it, above. Never ceases to amaze me.) In it, the PBS cameras followed a platoon of young high school kids who have just joined up and shipped off to Marine Corps boot camp. It starts with the camera right on the bus (about 1:40 into the clip linked above) and it follows these recruits from their arrival on Parris Island’s infamous yellow footprints all the way through their graduation from Marine Corps’ Recruit Training. The important part isn’t that, but instead Dyer’s commentary on the footage throughout. It is nothing short of brilliant in its examination of the nature of war, but particularly what it means about cultural transmission. At about one minute in, Dyer notes the following, as he stands near the changing of the guard at Lenin’s Tomb:
… But there are, on average, about twenty wars going on in the world at any given time, and they are all waged by men who learned to be soldiers away from the battlefield. All soldiers belong to the same profession and it makes them different from everybody else. They have to be different for their job is ultimately about killing and dying…And that doesn’t come natural to any human being. Yet all soldiers are born civilians. The method for turning young men into soldiers – people who kill other people – is basic training. It’s essentially the same all over the world and it always has been – because young men everywhere are pretty much alike. It doesn’t really matter where you’re coming from or what you’ve been doing before.
What Dyer is talking about is most kindly called acculturation. With immigrant populations we use the term assimilation – and given all of the discussion about immigration in the news lately, you’ve likely heard some downright idiocy on the topic. If you care a little more deeply about the issue, you might even have read something not completely useless on the subject. The issues are not insignificant and they call come back to this issue of culture – and its transmission. The internet managed to deliver this link, which appears to be almost a transcript of the piece of video I’ve linked above, but I believe it’s from a book. It might seem to some to be anti-war or denigrate the military – indeed, some of that sentiment comes through in the selection of value-laden words by Dyer – but his larger points about culture and its transmission are spot-on.
In peacetime, and in a free society like the United States and most western nations, the theory goes that the transmission of culture happens through mass media. Up until recently, some people questioned the vigor of the First Amendment and its underlying tenets from the Lockean notion of the “marketplace of ideas,” generally the same people who don’t believe in free markets. After all, the claim went, only the rich and powerful have access to a pulpit. Therefore, the Progressive screed continues, only the white, male, hegemony controls what the masses here and they use it to perpetuate existing power structures. If you think I’m making this up, try reading this. The phrase “check your privilege” is now considered de riguer at what now passes for undergraduate universities, in classes that are now categorized as education, when they look – for all intents and purposes – like Marxist indoctrination, dressed up as part of the curriculum for most liberal arts degrees. The irony is amazing.
The Lockean notion of the “marketplace of ideas” is a concept that recognized that if one were literate, the ability to “publish” one’s ideas- in the sense of “make available to the public “- rested almost solely on the ability to read and write. Paper and pen or pencil were not economically so expensive that they were a barrier to anyone writing. (In another one of his little pearls of wisdom, my dear friend and mentor Greg Glassman pointed this out to me one day, in his inimitable style: “No one can complain that they couldn’t write the great American novel or paint their masterpiece because of barriers to entry. It’s not the cost of brushes and a paint set that prohibits it, nor is it the cost of a pen and paper that’s holding one back from sharing his amazingly brilliant piece of fiction. Bullshit. If you haven’t written it it’s because you fucking can’t, not because it’s too expensive to do it. The same is now largely true with photographs because of the improvements in technology.”) Of course, the marketplace of ideas doesn’t mean anyone is obligated to accept your bullshit, just as no one is obligated to give one whit of consideration to my ramblings. The internet, however, has rendered nugatory the claim that only the powerful have a voice. Everyone and anyone can publish now and it can be found by search engines for anyone who wants to look for it or a related topic. People can even increase their audience for pennies using a variety of SEO techniques. In short, the claim that the marketplace of ideas doesn’t exist – if it ever had any validity – has been OBE.
Notwithstanding this freedom, it turns out the marketplace of ideas can be short-circuited. Our Founding Fathers probably hadn’t thought about it at the time, but when the Nation moved to mandatory public education – followed by the insistence in that same school system that further college education is an absolute necessity – we now have a fifteen-year long, only-mildly-interrupted-by-the-summer, acculturation process, being run by school boards, teachers’ unions, and both state and federal guidelines. I doubt that very many parents have any involvement at all in the selection of their kids educational content. This is not a good thing.
This fault line was just exposed the other day and quickly went viral when Mike Rowe, popular television figure with a massive following on Facebook, responded to a tweet by Bernie Sanders. Sanders – an avowed and open “democratic socialist” (which is really a pretty funny term when you get right down to it) – of course believes that more college is the answer. So much so that he is openly campaigning on the “free shit” platform: namely, free college. Rowe responded as noted above.
Given my life in the Marine Corps, and having four kids of a pretty good spread of ages, my children have gone to schools everywhere from Kadena Air Base, to Catholic School in Virginia, to public schools in California, Virginia, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Florida, and on-base schools in several other states, including North Carolina and Virginia. Two have also finished college. Most recently, my daughters were attending a reasonably well-regarded public high-school in Hingham, Massachusetts. At one point, the younger two were complaining about a book report they had to do. This was sometime back in 2011 or so.
“What book?” I asked while we were in the car, riding back from school.
One of my daughter’s held up a copy of President Obama’s book, Dreams of My Father. This was during the election season for his second Presidential bid.
I nearly spit out my coffee.
“What in the holy fu-??!” They looked at me and said, “I know” thinking I was referring to the injustice of the book report, or even of their preference not to be reading that particular book, but that had nothing to do with it.
“You are required to read a book by a sitting President?!? What the fuck is this, Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book? Holy shit, we’re a fucking banana republic, now.”
My daughters were a little shocked at my response, needless to say, but I couldn’t believe that any U.S education system would require its students to read the opinions and ideas of a sitting President, given that he was not far away from his second election and the very group of people being required to read it were about to be – or were – eligible to vote! That borders on the insane to me. And it gets worse, down to the granular level. To wit:
One of my daughters – my youngest – has been a budding libertarian since high school. (I’m not going to pretend that I didn’t have something to do with it, nor that I’m not proud). Her insistence upon questioning her teachers or existing dogma, however, has caused her no little stress. On the matter of the book report of our current President, how do you think my daughter got graded when she reviewed the book unfavorably? Moreover, what do you think was the tenor of the red-ink comments, especially coming from a member of the Teacher’s Union, one of the most ardently supportive unions of our current Commander-in-Chief.
Yes, boys and girls, this is the education that your tax dollars buys.
To have a sitting elected official’s bullshit personal Prop-O piece front and center in the curriculum before children-who-are-about-to-become-voters is tantamount to putting cigarette machines in elementary school cafeterias and hallways. The harm in the case of the cigarettes is only their lungs; in the case of the book it is to their intellectual and even physical freedom. (And I feel the same way about any other President’s bio, so we can dispense with the reflexive “BOOOOOSSSSHHHH!!!” screeches). I have no idea if he wrote one and put it in front of kids, but if he did? Fuck him, too. You could make it a Constitutional Amendment as far as I’m concerned: No Public School System Shall Ever Require the Reading of a Biography of a Sitting Elected Official, Nor Shall Any Student Be Graded Upon Any Such Nonsense.
Now, when I say these kinds of things, people think that I’m hyperventilating and I’m losing my mind. I’m merely reporting the facts. People can draw what conclusions they will, but I would respectfully submit that the “culture wars” are not imaginary. They matter. Facebook has forever ruined the word “meme,” (and “memetics” may have done that on its own), but ideas matter.
Newton’s Principia fucking mattered; it altered the world in ways that we can probably never fully appreciate. So did Beethoven’s symphonies, which are nothing more than the musical effusions of one man’s mind. Slavery is an idea – a very, very shitty one – that we have thankfully discarded, although only recently for some countries. Technology is what it is today because ideas matter. This means that a country’s ideas about political and economic organization, about ethics, its law, and how its children are inculcated with important – i.e. valuable and valued – cultural information, this is a country’s future. What gets transmitted is a society’s necessary and logical bequest to its children.
This is as true of the baseball culture as it is of the entire United States. The matter is simply one of degree or scale. It was true of ice hockey when I played it, as well as rugby, as well as wrestling, jiu jitsu, football, and on and on.
When I was getting ready to get winged in may of 1993, we had to put in for aircraft selection. This had already followed our selection of either Fixed-Wing, Props, or Helos for Marines coming through primary flight training. I took helos and now was going to select for one of four different models the Marine Corps flew: the CH-46 medium transport helicopter, UH-1N (“Huey”) utility helicopters, CH-53E large lift helicopters, or AH-1W SuprCobra attack helicopters. I was asking an instructor about the selection process and he said to me: “Ya know. Everyone has a theory about how it comes out but I’ve now reconciled myself to the fact that it’s God. You get put right where you belong. Every community has its own unique culture and you find out very quickly if you fit or not. If you don’t, you’ll know it and you’ll ask for a transfer. If not, you’ll leave…but I’ll be damned if somehow it doesn’t seem to work out right the vast majority of the time.” I don’t know about the Almighty’s hand in selection, but I’ll be damned if it didn’t seem like we all wound up right where we were disposed to being.
What we believe in any given culture, small or large – our collective values – what we revere, is exactly what we will propagate and get. It can be courage and honor for soldiers, or physical dominance for athletes; cacophonous noise in music or the subtlety and complexity of jazz (not my bag, by the way, but requires talent to play well); or even in the esthetic we have for beauty, between a fit woman or the dysmorphia of models. We’ll get, culturally, exactly what we transmit and esteem, along with the consequences of that. And that is exactly why I rail against socialism, or laws and courts that give immunity to government officials, or idiotic gun control legislation, or climate change bullshit and the redistributionist policies that come out of that, or the horrors of asset forfeiture and Prohibition (including the drug war), or Obamacare – none of which has worked, nor will work, as claimed. I point these out because the premises upon which they are based are frequently fallacious, because they result in horrible outcomes, and because the incentives that lead to these kinds of harms to people are entirely predictable.
Now, I don’t expect people’s love of the power over others to disappear any time soon, but if the American experiment is to survive, it’s going to have to take a lesson from military culture and figure out how to convey the self-sustaining notions necessary to ensure the survival of ideas that we hold invaluable – and that right there – the acknowledgment that there are transcendent and valuable concepts, like Truth, Integrity, Freedom, Property, Individual Liberty, the Rule of Law, and a host of other “intangibles” that are necessary precursors to a truly liberal and civilized society – is the starting point for the discussion and we can’t seem to even get past that. We need to stop apologizing for past transgressions, being slaves to the guilt of multiculturalist nonsense, and lay claim to those values that are at the heart of any ethically sound society: We once did.
When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.–Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.
What follows in that great document is a list of factual justifications for the American revolution, for the abandonment of settling the matter with words and instead resorting to force of arms, as against what was then the greatest military in history. A framed copy of that document hangs on my wall. Every now and then I like to take a look at where we are now, by comparison… It feels me with both a sense of purpose and of dread. Things do not look good to me.
For example, when I read the complaint that the King “has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance,” I can’t help but look at my paycheck and laugh. I had this point driven home to me one day in a casual conversation about economics, again by Greg Glassman: “Setting aside the issue of ownership of other human beings for the moment – which is evil – but setting aside that aspect of Slavery, and considering it only as a mathematical issue, slavery is a one-hundred percent marginal tax rate.” After digesting that, the corollary becomes clear, too: you are economically free – which is what really matters in a free society – only to the extent that you get to keep of the market rate of your labor or the market rate for your property. If the government takes 50% of the fruits of your labor, you are 50% free. That is the inescapable reality of the socialization of anything – and everything. Compulsory insurance? At least with cars you can choose not to drive, but now with the Justice Roberts’ abandonment of any need to protect individual liberty, the original purpose and raison d’etre of the judiciary, we are now bound by fictitious obligations to “society,” for which we must pay, and this is merely by being born in the United States because, in Justice Roberts’ world, as long as it’s called a tax, Congress can do it.
The colonists complained that the Crown “has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation” and I laugh after the recent treaty with Iran. I don’t even care about the particulars – in fact, I think we will ultimately benefit by engaging in free trade with despotic countries, both in an overall reduction in human misery and suffering, as well as a concomitant reduction in resentment and anti-American sentiment which closed countries can foment when contact with US goods, services, and – most importantly – cultural ideas, are cut off. No, my objection is how the Constitution has been stomped on by this President and previous ones in incredible acts of Executive arrogance. The Climate Change Treaty also comes to mind. In fact, the entire Executive Order makes me cringe. That skit is brilliant, and funny, though it fills me with an
incredible sadness.
Our forefathers resorted to violence in response to the Stamp Act and a tax on tea and we sit idly by and watch far worse with nary a peep. Without any central government, bound only by cultural values, people of the various (and frequently fighting) Thirteen Colonies banded together in support of Massachusetts after the passage of the Intolerable Acts. Now, by comparison, we are divided into special interest groups and we lobby against each other for a piece of the ever-increasing tax pie that government collects of us, begging for a handout, lest we should be cut out of the federal trough.
For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent… (Nothing need be said here, but it’s worth pointing that there was no income tax in the United States until 1913; somehow we managed to accomplish quite a bit without it).
For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury: (U.S. citizens held without bail or trial for years in the War on Terror)
For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:
I’m not a revolutionary by heart. Hell, I’ve spent most of my life working for the federal government in some form or another, but I wonder how long this goes on for before the straw finally breaks the camel’s back. My sense of it now is that we are the proverbial frog being cooked slowly. We’re not yet cooked, but the water is getting rather warm. My contention – no, rather, my unfortunate, but unswerving, conclusion is that unless we revive the cultural values, the necessary soil in which individual Liberty may prosper, we will one day be worse than dead: we will be slaves by our own choosing.
Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our… brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends. We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.