Our new cultural determinism

S ometime in the last quarter century, without much notice or fanfare, the developed world slipped from the Age of Materialism into the Age of Culture. For at least 150 years, individual behavior, public motivations, the whole infrastructure of the human enterprise was understood, widely and basically, to be rooted in material interests. Today, however, culture is the framework for understanding what moves the world. Culture has become to our time what religion was to the early modern period and science to the Enlightenment. Economic Man of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has abdicated in favor of Cultural Person, and the new regime has replaced class consciousness with culture consciousness. The philosophical materialism that underpinned a century of Marxism and evolved into economic determinism has given way to a cultural determinism every bit as dogmatic as the old hardcore communism. In the United States, if not throughout the developed world, this cultural determinism has trickled down from the intellectuals and now assumes the position of common sense. Culture is the new catch-all, the court of first and last appeal, the basis of public policy, the obligatory note, the place we all reside. It is astonishing to contemplate the breadth and frequency of the appeal to culture. It hardly takes a ready ear or wide reading to turn up instances of culture's invocation. We're told that American politics runs on the intensity of the "culture wars," because the legislative and electoral life of the nation is consumed in "cultural politics." Washington is awash in lobbyist money, yet the foot soldiers of the culture wars are oblivious, concerned only with asserting their "cultural identities." No wonder pundits and dispassionate scholars alike have taken to analyzing something they call "political culture." If current affairs of state have come to be regarded as essentially cultural matters, so to have the great streams of history. The rise of western power, according to the military historian Victor Davis Hanson, was a matter not of political strength, technological genius, or e c o nomic dynamism but of the "2,500-year tradition," running back to the Greeks, of soldier democrats. This cultural tradition, he announces, "explains not only why Western forces have overcome great odds to defeat their adversaries but also their uncanny ability to project power well beyond the shores of Europe and America. Numbers, location, food, health, weather, religion--the usual factors that govern the success or failure of wars--have ultimately done little to impede Western armies, whose larger culture has allowed them to trump man and nature alike." Hanson might sound a bit too much like a cheerleader for western imperialism, but even the sharpest and wisest critics of the spread of western power emphasized the culture in imperialism. It was as if they wanted to claim that Joseph Conrad, not British weapons, had oppressed Africa; the concept of"orientialism," not the French shackling of workers to rubber trees, presumably subjugated Vietnam. In an intellectual climate where imperialism is understood more as a function of the culture of nation-states than of the political dynamics of nation-building, citizenship itself is reconceived as "cultural citizenship." Even so staid a discipline as diplomatic history now appeals to culture, lest it fall into irrelevance. That high-school and college students are now more likely to read Chinua Achebe than Joseph Conrad must mean, by this reasoning, that imperialism is done for. But then how to explain its reappearance in the Bush administration's unabashed enthusiasm for conquest and domination? Presumably Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney, and Mr. Wolfowitz are all products of a "cowboy culture," as is often suggested. Or perhaps they are products of "the culture of national security," which according to Peter J. Katzenstein leads some foreign-policy "actors [to] respond to cultural factors" as much as, and sometimes more let stand than material interests--apparently it's not about the oil after all. Nor is this cultural determinism a bizarre quality of the i n t e l l ec tua l s an e lement in "the culture of academia," I 'm tempted to say. It has seeped out far and