Culture Clash

The Poverty of Purity

Colonising the colonisers, Brussels.

By John Foster

Throughout the developed world, the right is mobilising to defend culture.

What they mean by culture differs sharply from the mainstream definition that was dominant during the Cold War.

For the right, culture is somehow both unchanging and brittle.

Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) puts the defence of Leitkultur (leading culture) front and centre in its political manifestos: “AfD wants to preserve the cultural identity of Germany as shaped by the German people.”

To be clear, the threat to German culture they perceive does not stem from France, Britain, or even Russia. Rather—and rather unsurprisingly—it comes from the growing presence of Muslims in the country.

In addition to limiting or reversing immigration, AfD advocates promoting “traditional German customs.” True Germans must be inoculated against the threat posed by the lean barbarians from the Middle East with Schwerttänze (sword dancing), Maibäume (Maypoles), and bouts of public drunkenness.

The same demands can be found, mutatis mutandis, across Europe.

In Italy, the fascism-adjacent Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy) have staked out a position in defence of “God, homeland, and the family.” The more enterprising among them have extended this project to encompass the veneration of important moments in Italian culture, such as Ancient Rome or the Mussolini regime.

Not to be left behind, Marine Le Pen has made the defence of unitary French culture a central plank in her Rassemblement National (National Rally) platform: “We say no to communitarianism. We say yes to national unity.”

The people who developed the concept of communitarianism, who were mostly quite conservative, would probably be scandalised to hear it bandied about in this way. But these far-right parties are clearly rejecting the idea that there might be communities worth valuing below the national level.

In the smaller countries of Europe, the hysterical defence of culture is even more intense. From Ireland to Hungary, the right mobilises to protect a supposedly timeless national heritage.

The purest distillation of this hysteria is found in the United States. There, the underlying premise is that national culture is a mixture of all the different things that have come together in the “great American melting pot.”

You don’t have to look too hard at the actual history of the United States—as opposed to the stories that its boosters love to tell—to recognise that the truth is very different. It’s hard to imagine a purer example of a settler colony.

Even though its foundational documents contained soothing phrases about the equality of all men, the United States started unapologetically as a white racial republic. The only reason that the Founding Fathers neglected to limit immigration to the burgeoning nation to white people was their belief that others simply wouldn’t want to come.

One of the few ideologically consistent premises of Trumpism is that whites have been victimised. A large proportion of the current administration’s actions are intended to erase any aspects of American history that might potentially be a source of embarrassment to its white citizens.

The intensity of the cultural essentialism currently gripping the United States derives from the history that is being effaced. It’s impossible to square the universalism which finally started to get meaningful traction in American public life after World War II with the racially inflected cultural chauvinism of those seeking to make America “great” again.

The defence of culture is based on the conviction that it was once pure and can be pure again but that any admixture from the outside will dilute its substance.

Cultures can be rigorously defined and separated from one another. To the extent that they change or develop, that development must come from the inside.

This view of culture is usually inflected by ideas of race. As Benedict Anderson noted, this synergistic relationship is the product of European colonialism. “The colonial state,” he writes in his seminal book Imagined Communities, “was obsessed with the demarcation of the Other, typically along racial or ethnolinguistic lines.”

Through an ironic twist, this demarcation process then refluxed into the metropoles of Europe, colonising the societies of the colonisers. Although the poverty of right-wing conceptions of culture cannot be solely attributed to this process, it has exerted a powerful influence in making contemporary cultural chauvinism more extreme.

Over the last half-century, elites on the far right have lamented this reverse colonisation with increasing intensity in order to deflect attention from the material exploitation ingrained in the liberal order.

This weaponisation of culture has paradoxically reduced it to a small subset of comforting and politically useful tropes.

In Ireland, where cultural narratives developed under the sign of a British colonial domination from which it was notionally trying to distance itself, the process has been particularly intense.

Long used to viewing themselves as colonised victims, the Irish have struggled with their nation’s transformation from a point of departure into a destination for refugees. Too many fail to perceive the centuries of hybridisation that preceded this shift.

Invoking the great poet Seamus Heaney, Irish journalist Fintan O’Toole sums up the fluidity that defined Irish culture, writing that it “never had a steady state. It was always Heaney’s ‘hurry through which known and strange things pass’, an endless argument between the familiar and the outlandish. That conformation is not a threat to tradition – it is the tradition.”

This formulation concisely captures the reality of culture throughout the developed world. Attempts to atavistically return to some earlier period regarded as “true” notwithstanding, culture will stagnate unless it makes room for new influences.

This is the great irony of the right-wing project of cultural restoration: there is no there there.

All attempts to clothe oneself in the garb of an earlier era create something new rather than returning to the purity of an imagined past.

Culture is always porous at the edges, always mutating as humans find new ways to live with their surroundings and each other. Once in contact, cultures can never be fully disambiguated.

This is why communitarianism is fundamentally a conservative project. It seeks to do away with processes of negotiation and change.

Ultimately, the right seeks the comfortable isolation of a shared and stable symbolic life. In worrying that change will undermine it, they fail to grasp that cultures only live and grow in shared spaces, in concert with each other.

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Photograph courtesy of Joel Schalit. All rights reserved.