Ron Dreher responds to an objector to Ron Maxwell

"Luxury is more ruthless than war"

Some bits:

We cultural elites are the kind of rootless people who will worry about the disappearance of the native culture in some far off Third World place, and fret about the business interests busy extinguishing that traditional culture. But we will look at people in our own backyard who are facing the same kind of challenge to maintain their own way of life, and condescend to them as backward racists.

And there is a reference to "A Global Culture" by David Rieff:

The reader seems to be saying that the idea that we can protect American identity against this larger sweep of history is a false hope. And, if I'm reading him correctly, it's a false hope for the same reason that trying to maintain any kind of traditional culture is a fool's game in the world today: that global capitalism is cleansing the planet of all rootedness, all tradition. Someone recently pointed me to a 1994 essay by David Rieff , which is an extended riff on the E.M. Cioran quote, "A civilization progresses from agriculture to paradox." What Cioran meant, if I understand him correctly, is that once a civilization progresses beyond agriculture, which made civilization possible to begin with by delivering people from a nomadic existence, it moves into an industrial economy, which abstracts people from the places to which they've been tied, even as it makes them wealthier. The further along this process becomes, the more we return to the nomadic state, though incomparably wealthier.

Rieff makes use of this Cioran observation to talk about how we Americans don't deal well with paradox. For example, he says that for all the contemporary obsession with diversity, we are strikingly homogenous and conformist (cf. the white American yuppie who enjoys the "diversity" of watching a DVD film by the gay Spanish director Almodovar, while eating take-out sushi -- but who can't stand the idea of the NASCAR fan taking the family to Burger Doodle to eat in the car before rushing home to watch "Walker, Texas Ranger" on TiVO; some cultures are more, ahem, diverse than others). Rieff's broader subject is the alleged world hegemony of American culture. Here, for our purposes, is the chief insight of the Rieff essay:

In the end, when we talk about the dominance of one culture, or even, less agonistically, of the globalization of culture, it is important to keep in mind that what is really at issue is the victory of culture that makes money over all other forms, and, particularly, over both folk culture and elite culture. Examples of this are everywhere and, if anything, the tendency toward bottom-line thinking is accelerating. Think of "art" filmmaking, a relatively accessible form when compared to, say, serial music, and how it has become about as relevant to the movie industry as antiquarian bookselling is to the publishing business. And if high culture now exists on life support, the culture of traditional societies, for all the lip service rendered to it by pious academics and political activists, is everywhere in retreat, and, in many parts of the world, on the brink of extinction as a living rather than as an artificially preserved set of forms.

...The essential point is that most people want this consumer culture, however much they may resent its effect on, say, the status of women. And yet such changes come as part of the package, since American consumer culture is corrosive of all traditions and established truths. In any case, the position of people in the Third World, which can be summed up as wanting more of this culture and resenting and fearing its triumph, is finally untenable. In the end, the market simply has more resources than a traditional society incapable of providing prosperity in an era of demographic increase and urbanization.

Rieff goes on to say that American mass culture is so exportable because unlike other nation's mass culture, it is not organic to a particular place. (The pseudonymous columnist Spengler, I think, often makes a similar point about Evangelical Christianity, which is booming among the world's poor). And it's not organic to a particular place because particularity has no strong roots in a country as young as ours. What does it mean, then, to get all anxious about maintaining one's traditions in the face of mass foreign immigrations when our "traditions," such as they are, are so shallow-rooted, and when, in fact, we have created a mass culture that is simultaneously the most efficient generator of wealth the world has ever seen, and the deadliest enemy of traditions, old certainties, venerable loyalties?

I sense that it is in this light that the reader who sent in the initial observation critiques Ron Maxwell. We are all complicit in this consumer culture, and have freely abandoned our cultural traditions as the price of admittance. Why are we only talking about traditions, and rootedness in place, in the face of anxiety over the effective dissolution of the southern border? Isn't there something phony in that? (he seems to be saying).

So: Have we become so accomodated to the condition of material ease that resistance to this tectonic aspect of modernity (the reality of mass immigration) in the name of a long-abandoned sense of tradition really is futile? Are we all really nomads now, with pretenses to the traditions that no longer exist for us, and haven't really done since the agricultural age? If so, Juvenal was right: "Luxury is more ruthless than war."