A Balanced Culture? How About A Balanced Nation First

A poster on Quora asked, "What will the balanced culture look like in America when it finally settles?"

The question presupposes some nationally-accepted measure of agreement on the term “balanced culture,” and a corollary that such a culture will be viewed from a common perspective. Neither condition has ever, does, or will ever exist in a multicultural pluralistic society like ours. What does “balanced” mean to you, to me, to the family next door, or the small town tucked into the hills of southern Missouri? Who is the arbiter of such a definition? There is no common definition, and even if our society writ large achieved some sort of stasis in which all cultural attributes (not differences, but attributes) were homogenized, the resulting national image would still be a colorful patchwork quilt, not a seamless bolt of bland culture-neutral fabric.

To the second aspect of the question—which suggests that something will “finally settle.” It is my deep belief, and fervent hope, that America will never finally settle with respect to our cultural diversity. I celebrate every highway and country lane of our vast and complex cultural roadwork, and I try to revel in the ever-changing landscape that has been whizzing past me as I’ve traveled throughout America for 69 years. But there have been detours and disappointments...some which I are in my rearview mirror, but others which now, once again, are dead ahead.

When I was growing up in the 1950s, the America I knew was mostly white and deeply flawed in its ignorant and often-shameful dismissal of Black Americans (we weren’t all that much better when it came to Jews, Hispanics, Asians, Eastern Europeans, Middle Easterners, or Pacific Islanders). For every “Leave it to Beaver” household of modest wealth and privilege, there were dozens of households where poverty, poor education, poor health, malnutrition, and desperation opened and closed every day. And for each one of those households, there were many others that looked down on them with bigoted glasses tinted with hatred and framed in ignorance. The idea of cultural diversity was anathema to millions of Americans who sought refuge behind their blood-soaked shields of racism.

By the 1960s, when I was beginning to move away from the comforts of my privileged life and into the world of a large university and work, the ground was shifting beneath our nation’s feet. Issues of race and poverty, haves and have-nots, justice and injustice, long-buried beneath the carefully graded surface of white America began to crack the skin of our social conscience—like the lava breaking through in fissures in Hawaii, bubbling up in unexpected places—and we were forced to look at our society in new, and often uncomfortable ways.

The Civil Rights movement, the Great Society, reforms in education, the nascent tremblings of sexual revolution, among other important topics, were supposed to bring the “balance” suggested in the Quora question. I can recall thinking as a teenager in the late 1960s that the nation was on its way to a new Enlightenment, perhaps a Renaissance of thought and behavior worthy of the Founder’s fondest dreams. We were on the cusp of our two-hundredth anniversary of independence, and maybe, just maybe, we were also on the verge of getting our act together and moving away from divisiveness and toward comity and a common cause.

But then came the blind idiocy of Martin Luther King, Jr.s’s and Bobby Kennedy’s assassinations in 1968, and the senselessness of Kent State in 1970, the Nixonian nightmare, the riots that burned in so many cities, and the increasing volume of the drumbeats of Vietnam and the long, sad lines of coffins arriving from that conflict. Overnight, it seemed, we were a nation in retrograde, sliding down a slope we had muddied all on our own…and what hopes there were for a balanced society lay piled in a heap at the bottom of that pit of stupidity.

Over the next thirty years, we, like the algae from which humankind arose, slowly re-evolved, found some traction in the founding ideals, and began pulling ourselves out of the mud and into a gathering light of awareness not just of self, but of selflessness. We began to rethink our prejudices and our hubris, and, for a short while we looked a bit like the nation to which we aspired—welcoming, embracing, less intolerant, perhaps more respected beyond our shores.

But that was just ephemera. After September 11, 2001, the ancient strains of tribalism reasserted themselves, but with a heat and thrust that was unlike anything my generation had seen before; old labels—conservative, liberal, Republican, Democrat, progressive, independent—turned themselves inside out and upside down, becoming unrecognizable to anyone who once leaned with assurance on the form and function of their parties or political leanings. And culturalism was caught in the crossfire.

Just as the Great Rift Valley is slowly, inexorably tearing Eastern Africa away from the main African continent, so, too, are America’s political parties, special interests, hate groups, and polarizing social media ripping the nation asunder—sometimes literally by cleaving families--parents from children--at our border, sometimes by splitting otherwise reasonable neighbors apart with an ax soaked in the venomous potion of political legerdemain, false narratives, and outright lies.

The ideals of John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau—empiricism and romanticism existing in a necessary tension to assure the rights of the individual while guiding the operation of an overarching government—seem for now to be fading in the grass, trampled deeper by the unshod hoofs of apocalypse-bound horses, ridden to a froth by crude, conscienceless would-be leaders ill-equipped intellectually, morally, ethically, and socially to recognize the damage they are doing.

The cultural balance that is the point of the initial question, “What will the balanced culture look like in America when it finally settles?” if at all achievable from any perspective or by any definition, must wait, perhaps decades, for the very framework of our democracy to be righted and re-placed on a firm foundation of mutual trust, cooperation, compromise, and shared accountability. And, as I noted above, even once we have (or if we have) reestablished a framework for cultural accommodation and celebration, it will not be a dull banner of colorless cloth…it will be a vibrant living fabric, iridescent and exciting to behold.