Multiculturalism, Universality, and Audiences: part 1
What does it mean to judge art in a multicultural world?
It is easy to take the idea of culture for granted, as a vague backdrop behind some specific activity of current interest. We might understand that some specific piece of art is an “element of our culture” without necessarily thinking much about what “culture” is in general. However, we may want to be more careful and systematic in our thinking if we are considering interactions between cultures.
In particular, the existence of the modern encyclopedic museum (like the Metropolitan Museum of Art or the Louvre) prompts questions like:
Are there any aspects of culture that are universal?
Are there ways in which we can judge the merits of a culture other than our own?
When one culture learns or borrows from another, where is the boundary between respectful imitation and cultural appropriation?
Culture has been defined as “the way of life for an entire society.” What’s good about that definition is that it implicitly includes the multigenerational, long-lived aspect of culture, since an “entire society” is typically long-lived. What’s bad about it is that it depends on a fuzzy notion of “way of life.” If we wanted to be a little more careful in our thinking, how should we think about culture?
Single vs. Multiple Cultures
Let’s first simplify the problem slightly with a thought experiment, imagining a single isolated society. Although this is not our modern condition, there was a time when it was the historic norm – a particular society had its culture, and the boundary of both society and culture was pretty clearly defined. If we imagine ourselves to be full participants in that isolated society’s culture, then some of our modern concerns go away. In such an isolated society, we have no cross-cultural questions or concerns. Instead, we are “only” concerned with the culture vs. non-culture boundary, the preservation vs. revision of the culture, and the question of quality: what constitutes a good element of the culture or a contribution to the culture (and correspondingly what constitutes a bad element of the culture, or a diminishing of the culture). These are all potentially difficult problems, and subject to dispute. We identify them here not because we expect to solve them, but simply to distinguish them from cross-culture or multi-culture concerns.
The perspective shifts if we now introduce another culture for comparison. Such cultural comparison is a familiar situation for a traveler, even within a single country and a nominally shared culture – in practice, one can often find large differences in vocabulary and habits over surprisingly short distances. When the comparison is between different countries, the cultural differences pile up even more quickly. It can be easier to see that something is “cultural” when seeing its counterpart in another culture; it can be easier to see what is valuable when comparing to a counterpart (or lack of counterpart) in another culture; and it can be easier to see what is appealing or unappealing about some aspect of a culture by comparing it to some vaguely similar aspect of another culture.
Making judgments
For all those comparisons, there is a slippery slope to avoid: it’s easy to do the comparison in an ignorant way (whether willfully or accidentally). All too often, incomprehension is transformed into a declaration that the poorly-understood culture is inferior. It’s also possible to perform such comparisons in the mode of looking for support rather than illumination. For example, there is apparently a fairly popular category of Japanese books that provide “scientific” explanations of Japanese cultural superiority. There is likewise a body of writing in English about the supposed superiority of the English language.
But while we need to avoid a kind of knee-jerk privileging of the familiar, we also need to be able to make judgments about what is superior vs. inferior. Can any such judgment be universal across cultures and stable over time? Unfortunately, that seems like a very high bar indeed. It might be possible to pick particular pairs of works and say, “for this pair of works X and Y, we have a high degree of confidence across all cultures and across all time that X is superior to Y.”
(As an aside: it’s not guaranteed that we can find any such X and Y. We’re considering it, but it’s worth noting that such universal judgments might be impossible. Of course, knowing for sure that such a judgment is indeed impossible would in itself be an interesting result).
Even if such a universal and stable comparison does exist, it seems unlikely to be very useful or interesting. We would simply have established that X and Y were so divergent in their merits and appeal that X was almost ridiculously superior. It seems likely that every “interesting” comparison between works would involve some X and Y that were close enough in their merits that it could be imagined that someone, somewhere might reverse their roles.
Globalism
Recall that we initially assumed that we were embedded in a single culture and trying to evaluate only the aspects of that culture; then we slightly enlarged the universe of interest to include another culture for comparison. Now we’re ready to consider the actual situation of the modern world. In the modern world, there is a cosmopolitan globalist culture providing an operating system for the planet; however, that globalist culture is somewhat thin soil and arguably has no genuine cultural artifacts of any value. Part of the humor in the movie Up in the Air comes from the protagonist’s enthusiastic embrace of the global travel culture that most sensible people merely tolerate.
Regional/national/local cultures exist semi-independently of that globalist culture, unless and until something requires larger cooperation. Although the distinct globalist culture is weak, it is also real – it’s a part of how international business can happen.
We could potentially say that global business is a distinct culture itself, and that would be technically true; however, that would not capture the way in which certain kinds of cross-cultural activity bring in the globalist culture even if the activity is not conceptualized as international business. For example, a family reunion of a far-flung family will necessarily intersect with the international business paradigm in multiple ways during the planning and execution of necessary travel. This intersection occurs even though none of the participants experiences the reunion as a form of international business.
Is anything universally valued?
In a multi-cultural world, it’s not clear how to understand universals and how to make value comparisons. The encyclopedic museum, which used to confidently stride across the world picking up “good stuff,” is now paralyzed by the combination of not knowing how to do cross-cultural value judgments and not knowing whether an object of potential interest can be sensibly separated from its culture of origin. There are not likely to be any answers to these questions that are completely satisfactory.
On one hand, it’s trivially true that any cultural artifact is best understood in its original cultural context. On the other hand, we can reasonably ask whether that constraint is excessive. It certainly limits the number and nature of people who can understand the given cultural artifact. If we took this paradigm to its illogical limit, we would wind up with islands of culture where it was impossible to even compare two artifacts side-by-side if they came from different cultures, since they would each need to stay in their different cultural contexts forever. Especially considering the diffusion and cross-fertilization that actually occur at culture boundaries, such a forced separation seems worse than the encyclopedic museum’s collection – even if the museum’s comparisons are necessarily based on limited understanding.
(Another aside: understanding the merits and faults of an encyclopedic museum is the sort of area that is prone to caricature and bad-faith arguments. It’s easy to contrast obviously-terrible practices with obviously-better alternatives. It’s more challenging to ensure that the discussion includes other equally-important issues that don’t have such clear answers.)
If we conclude that genuine universals don’t really exist in a necessarily multi-cultural world, and we are unwilling to wall cultures off from one another, how should we think about artistic merit? I think that part of the answer is to change the framing and think in terms of audiences. I will take that up in the second part.