You Think America Is A Multicultural Society?
No, It's Post-Cultural, Says Penn State Professor
May 8, 2000
University Park, Pa. - You probably think the United States is a multicultural society, a big spicy stew of distinct cultures all simmering together and contributing different flavors to the mix: African Americans, Hispanics, Asian/Pacific Islanders, native Americans, descendants of immigrants from Western Europe, Democrats and Republicans (and Independents and Libertarians), straights and gays (and transgendered people), radical leftists and the religious right, to name just a few.
Nope, sorry, you're wrong.
Penn State English professor Christopher Clausen argues in a new book that the United States has become the world's first post-cultural society. By that Clausen means that America has "neither one single dominant culture nor a number of smaller ones, only an unsettling mixture of freedom and nostalgia."
A keen observer of U.S. politics and society, Clausen says that contemporary America is "a society existing after the death of cultures." His new book, "Faded Mosaic: The Emergence of Post-Cultural America," is being published by Ivan R. Dee this month.
In "Faded Mosaic," Clausen says that America no longer has a single dominant culture that bestows on people a stable identity - or sets limits on their thoughts and behavior - as traditional cultures once did. On that point Clausen agrees with multiculturalists. But Clausen goes on to say that America's subcultures -- which multiculturalists would say are thriving after centuries of suppression -- are equally powerless.
America was once billed as a great "melting pot" that mixed together a great number of cultures and created one out of many, and for a time that was true, Clausen says. "Under the original idea of America as a melting pot, all the cultures were melted down into one," he says. "But now they've been melted down into none - and that's what I call post-culturalism."
In post-cultural America, "all of the cultural commandments that once would have told you how to live your life - it's right to do this, it's wrong to do that - have become subjectivized," Clausen says. "Cultural precepts have become almost a matter of taste. Everybody has his own different value system: You do what you think is right, I'll do what I think is right. But that means nobody really thinks anything is right -- people just have lifestyles."
Clausen is ambivalent about whether America's emergence as the world's first post-cultural society is a good or bad thing. "In a post-cultural society, you have almost total freedom in your personal life. You have an unprecedented degree of freedom and personal choice, which is both good and bad," Clausen says.
Living in a society that's not free is unthinkable, Clausen says. But the widening array of almost unrestricted choices that goes along with virtually total freedom can lead to "a lot of vertigo" when you're trying to make decisions, Clausen says: Get married or not get married? Marry someone your parents like or you like? Have heterosexual, homosexual, or bisexual relationships? Have children or not have children? Have children within a marriage or outside a marriage? Raise them strictly or permissively? Practice a traditional religion or none at all? Or make up one of your own?
"Post-culturalism's multiplicity of choices, among other things, leads to nostalgia for a culture that would answer some of these questions for you."
So, according to Clausen, what is the intelligent way of living in a post-cultural world, where neither the monotholic American culture of days gone by nor present-day America's many subcultures have any impact on us? The most important thing is to "recognize that this is where we are, instead of denying it. And if we accept that, we'll be better off."
Currently, Clausen says, both multiculturalists on the left and conservatives on the right are "trying to bring back something that is gone forever" -- the multiculturalists a vibrant and thriving mix of subcultures and the conservatives a single dominant culture replete with traditional family values. "The most productive thing," Clausen says, "would be to find ways of coping with so much freedom without pretending to go back to something that's gone forever."
U.S. colleges and universities have "vast resources for studying the cultures of the past and present," Clausen says. "But instead of teaching today's students to live in a museum and reverently approach these cultures as though they are whole, intact objects that last forever, it would be better if American higher education would approach other cultures as if they are bodies of many things, some of which are useful and some not."
Americans need to study other cultures in a penetrating and disciplined way, Clausen says. Only by doing that can we "sort out some ways of living, some ways of making choices that we have to make, in a society where no culture places any demand on us. We need to emphasize the positive aspects of this post-cultural condition while avoiding the shallowness and the conformity and the aimlessness that are its negative aspects."
Clausen has been teaching English at Penn State since 1985. He has written widely on literature, especially poetry, and in recent years he has shifted his attention to U.S. politics and culture. His most recent book is "My Life with President Kennedy" (University of Iowa Press, 1994), an unusual mix of history, keen observation of the U.S. political and cultural landscape, and autobiography. The first of the book's nine essays is about JFK's continuing appeal and his impact on the generation that turned 18 when Kennedy was elected.
His other books include "The Moral Imagination: Essays on Literature and Ethics" (University of Iowa Press, 1986) and "The Place of Poetry: Two Centuries of an Art in Crisis" (University of Kentucky Press, 1981) which The New York Times named a notable book of the year. He has also written many articles on 19th- and 20th-century literature and culture.
Clausen earned his B.A. degree at Earlham College in Indiana, a master’s degree at the University of Chicago, and his Ph.D. at Queen’s University in Canada.
Early reviews of "Faded Mosaic" are favorable.
In the Boston Globe, Bill Marx praises Clausen’s balanced approach to the changes in America’s cultural landscape. "Reasonable argument about national decline is a rarity. ‘Faded Mosaic’ posits the blanding of America in a balanced manner that gives each side of the abyss — culture and post-culture — its due. . . . To his credit, Clausen draws blood by taking on bromides from across the political spectrum," Marx writes. "Clausen does not give us ways to escape the post-cultural: McWorld looks unbeatable, and he actually prefers its anarchistic liberty to the tyranny found in other parts of the world. . . . ‘Faded Mosaic’ is a provocative book that sets forth an uncomfortable truth: a cafeteria culture will serve nothing but junk food."
In Booklist, Ray Olson writes that Clausen "remains uncertain whether the postcultural U.S. prefigures a postcultural world. He points to the persistence of languages, local custom, and nationalism outside the U.S. as factors mitigating U.S. postcultural globalism. Fascinating and novel analysis from a thoughtful, nonpessimistic pundit."
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For more information, contact Alan Janesch at 814/865-7517 or
. For a review copy, phone Ivan R. Dee, Publisher, at 312/787-6262 and ask for the publicity department.