Alan Paton and culture

Somewhere in my basement, buried in boxes of books in need of shelves, lies a copy of Cry, the Beloved Country, by Alan Paton. Five years ago I deemed the cover irreparable, and I replaced it with duct tape. All that to say, the book is good. It's a novel about the tragedy of mid-20th century South Africa. Its brilliance lies in Paton's ability to see the enormous complexity of racial problems, and, peering into the blackness of the human heart, to see possibilities for reconciliation. He could, as W.B. Yeats said, "hold in a single thought reality and justice."

As Paton sets out the central conflict of the novel, he makes one statement that forms the thesis of the first portion of the book: "The white man has broken the tribe. And it is my belief--and again I ask your pardon--that it cannot be mended again." In this statement Paton caught the first winds of the gathering storm of globalization. The white man--and Western culture, and the global economy--have broken the tribe, and it will not be mended.

So we're left here, with fragments of broken cultures, baubles left over from something grand and important, reduced to a price tag, or a dance performed for tourists. I am tempted to say that globalization turned our world upside-down, but that's not the case. Globalization shoved our world toward the middle. What used to be a world of fragmentary, unique, patchwork cultures is being shoved toward a centerline. In many countries--including America--we can now speak of Culture with a capital C. Homogeneity has replaced originality, and that homogeneity, rather than feeling diverse, has come out feeling bland.

In America today many people will start their day with yoga, have Chinese food for lunch, and then watch the World Cup while they eat their dinner. These swirling cultural currents have left the Western world without a firm grasp on anything. Culture is something to be consumed, not possessed or experienced, so marketers hijack consumables from other cultures and sell them to Americans, who then relish their own hipness at being the first on the block to have tried the new Thai place.

But the tribe is broken, and it will not be repaired. So it's up to us to create a new culture, not based on consumption, but on digging deep into the mines of our creativity and coming up with something fresh, something unborrowed.

As Kavanagh said,

That in the end
I may find
Something not sold for a penny
In the slums of Mind.