Culturist Amy Whinehouse

I heard Amy Winehouse heard for the first time. That is, I have seen her many times, but I never saw a performance that grabbed me more than it was just illustrative of her tragic wastiness. But her version of Marvin Gaye’s “I Heard it Through the Grapevine” with Paul Weller of the Jam was a stunning virtuoso performance. She could miss nothing, but remained both vicious and wild, yet controlled to the point of perfection in pitch with metered clever vocal fills. And even the fade-outs from her competent co-vocalist happened at the prescribed time. But her final intonation of the chorus, when she went quiet, it was like you’d imagine the subtle twang of Mae West in her prime.



With reason, many could conclude that Winehouse is deleterious to the success of western civilization. She is a role model of potentially disastrous impact. She makes drugs and the refusal to go to rehab sexy. That would be true were she not such a public mess and so embarrassing to herself. Yet, culturists know that youth follow those with status. That is why we need values leadership from positive and popular role models. I would much rather those who took care of their families and diligently pursued their studies in the name of western civilization getting glamorized. I would much rather see the artistic elite banish junkies for shame's sake. But that would cost us the Rolling Stones, Billie Holiday, and many other artists. It would make the West much more like communist China. And that, I would not like to see.

Winehouse brings a very interesting cultural mishmash she brings to the table. She is definitely Jewish, her music is clearly derivative of African – American soul tradition ala Motown, she has the biker chic that tattoos bring, and – most of all – she embodies that ennobling yet defiling self-destruction, Ziggy Stardust-style tragedy of the burn out and crash of the chosen one, the rising star. While she presents no role model, she represents a vamp, a type, a trope, that we can all share joy in. In her way, if teachers want to use her for edification, she even ties us back to the 19th century romantic tragedy of the romantic Goethe's Lotte who died for love. The sacrificial lamb to our deep cultural longing for bonding through her familiar formulaic romantic cultural mish mash. Unlike the more electronic pop idols, she reminds us of the jewels of western culture; the romance of the individual self. Perhaps, in a world where offending Islam may soon become a crime, her drunken iconic presence is a culturist good.

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Culturist Dissertation Done !!!

This week I finished my dissertation. The two weeks before or two days after that I could not write a post; my streak of years of weekly posts broken. But it was for good occasion as I just climaxed getting my dissertation done in three years - record time. Over the last three years I have been under constant pressure to write. I have written 5 books, including the dissertation, in 7 years. This is the first time I have been without a text pressure in a long time.

I would feel remiss were I not to tell you something of the content of my dissertation. My dissertation covers Frances Kellor's thoughts and actions as she led the national Americanization movement that greeted immigrants from 1898 to 1921. The literature portrays this movement as a coercive attempt by American society to enforce conformity on immigrants. There is truth to that. But Kellor was a deep activist. She coached and wrote about basketball, created networks of domestic workers, founded the National Urban League from a coalition, had everyone in the streets publicly when she made the 4th of July Americanization Day, tried numerous times to make all American residents super progressive activists, ran the Federal Bureau of Immigrant Education, ran two Presidential campaigns, united much of the world in arbitration, reluctantly led the fight for suffrage, and started Industrial, Educational, Political, and Neighborhood Americanization programs in order to increase democracy.

The night of my dissertation I went and got trashed with Sarah. The day after turning in my dissertation I taught a college course on Culturism and World Civilization. We spoke of how every major civilization has a story. Without Socrates and Jesus we'd have no western civilization. Without Muhammad no Islam. Without Confucius Asia would not have its current form. I told them the story of how the Romans wrote themselves, retroactively, into Homer's ballad, the Iliad. It is the same with Muslims writing them into Abraham's story as the son intended for inheritance. Civilizations need stories and these can't be made anew. You must look back. Incisively a student noted that it is hard to tell if these things even happened. And, I pointed out that this is especially dangerous for the West. Universal scientific rationalism peels away our dedication to our particular civilization. Islam defies the rationalism and China has a high context race-based cultural source of unity in a scientific age. But we only have individualism holding us together on the bonds wear thin. Culturism is needed.

That night I spoke late with Mary. She is an American studies student and a very old friend of the family. She is now in the American studies department. We spoke forever. Among the topics, my having dedicated my dissertation to my professor Lynn Gordon. She taught a course called "What are teachers for?" This course taught me about women's history and community and ways of presenting heroines. I enthused to Mary about how school has given me so much perspective generally. I can do Kellor's Americanization as labor history, or consumer history, or sexuality history, or gender history, or progressive history or education history. My mind has been expanded by three year doctoral crash course. Mary and I battled through the night about how much of ideology is foisted or malleable, and how ideology is connected to or grows out real realities. And, my schooling had made me about to recognize most of the theorists Mary knew. FUN !

I spent this morning and afternoon, Oct. 2nd, 2009, a day and a half after turning in the dissertation, taking Real Estate licensing and investment classes. I am headfirst into a new endeavor that will teach me something completely different. It may reform me as a person. What I cannot figure out is my new relationship to text. As I have said, I spent all of the last 7 or 8 years working feverishly, 7 days a week, long hours, writing my books. Now I needn't read my books. I have no full time class for which to research. Being possibly free of text creates nausea for me and makes me confront the world outside of text. But this is okay as my world civilization course is making me think things will run their course, in the long haul of history, regardless of my ideology. Still I write you this not across the divide from the post-dissertation barrier.

Culturism in Nature

We are hardwired to absorb the culture we’re brought up in. People quickly become partial to the ideology of their culture even if it is ridiculous. Tribes would die if each new person had to be rationally convinced of the logic of the tribe’s system. Males must be willing to die for their group by thirteen years of age. Having a solid zeal for your tribe would present a huge battle advantage against a tribe where people don't consider their tribe rational or special. In nature, critical assessment is a luxury that would be bred out. Automatic cultural absorption and zeal would be bred in.

We see that cultural transmission is natural in the speed with which kids pick up language. We also see a mechanism for naturally reinforcing culture when kids seek out differences and mock each other. Teens are notoriously (rock) group oriented. In the Nurture Assumption, Judith Harris locates the point of cultural melding at the new generation. She notes that when parents move to a foreign country the parents unsuccessfully adopt. If the child came early enough, it is not a matter of “when in Rome do as the Romans do;” It is a matter of “When in Rome, become a Roman.” The kids become one of the locals.

Group formation happens throughout the animal kingdom. Chimps patrol their borders and are murderous to those who come in from an outside group. Scientists have taken baby rat out of their family settings, cleaned it and then put the smell of another group on it. When they put that rat baby back in the den, the family kills them. While they do not recognize each other as individuals, coral fish have bright colors to mark their presence at a territory. Antigens mark invading foreign bacteria. This is natural. Groups form and this serves a survival function in nature.

These pressures steer us subconsciously. Michael Mitchell created artificial groups by (incorrectly) telling people they were part of a group that overestimates or underestimates based on the amount of dots they thought were on a piece of poster paper. Once formed the groups discriminated against each other. We only need the slightest pretext to favor our group. It is natural. And, it feels good! My love for the Lakers is an example. GO TEAM!!

Natural and wonderful are not synonymous. But there are two culturist takeaway points that come from this post. First of all, the tribe that is most united often wins. Even if, as with the Greeks fighting the Persians at Salamis, we are united on our respect for individual conscience, group affiliation helps. We must all hang together or we shall all hang separately. That is why we need to push culturism, not multiculturalism. The second culturist point is that, since children come hardwired to absorb a culture, we adults have a duty to provide one. If we do not give the youth a satisfactory sense of belonging to a community, they will find it in gangs. Fortunately, when pushing a sense of belonging to the western world, natural and wonderful happily converge! GO TEAM GO!!!!

Lippmann, Arnold, and Culturism

Walter Lippmann and Matthew Arnold were culturist opponents who agreed on a lot. Living as the industrial revolution was tearing up the remnants of 19th century society, both decried the decay. Mathew Arnold vented in his beautiful book, “Culture and Anarchy.” Walter Lippmann’s masterpiece is “Mastery and Drift.” Both of these beautiful writers sought to reign in anarchy and drift, the same sort of decadence and decay, that western society faces today.

Lippmann hoped that we would find social coherence and direction by embracing the terms and conditions of the emerging scientific age. We could find adventure in applying the scientific spirit in confronting emerging social problems. New choices in unprecedented situations had to substitute for the moribund pieties and traditions that used to suffice. Rather than look to the past for a guide, he asked us to look to science and the future.

Arnold sought to anchor our fragmentation by tying us to our past; by living up to the best that has been thought and said. Famously, he argued that we must unite Jerusalem and Athens; that is our answers will come via looking both to traditional religious and secular western truths. While facing the future, Arnold looked to western tradition as a guide. As many conservatives, he had a predilection to want to return to a simpler time, to turn back the clock.

As we face the flotsam and wreckage that is the American culture, out of control debt and an uncertain future, which philosopher should we emphasize? This culturist says both! Scientific inquiry need not be corrosive of western culture or democracy. Science becomes corrosive when it belittles the past as a time of unscientific ignorance. Science becomes corrosive when it only recognizes the existence fleeting empiricist sensations. The scientific worldview of a hedonistic shopper without a history cannot sustain a viable society. In fact, it cannot even sustain science.

Our scientific adventure has to happen within a Roman / Christian sense of moral responsibility to history. Science comes about via a dedication to deferred gratification. This is best nurtured by a two-parent home. It requires a sustainable economy. On what basis can we regain a sense of duty? We can do so by recognizing that our heritage is unique. China and Islam show that not all roads lead to science or democracy. We must once again recognize that the West is a product of thousands of years of effort towards a particular humanistic view of man, rather than an automatic unfolding of universal scientific truths.

Multiculturalism’s obscuring of differences between cultures corrodes our appreciation of the unique nature of the West. Multiculturalism’s veneration of the past in the form of traditional societies undermines our sense of progress. Culturism takes diversity and progress seriously. Culturism does not buy into the idea that science makes all particular cultural stories relics of a pre-scientific age. Particular divergent cultures still persist and are in competition. If we do not look out, one of our competitors will come to dominate us. To have Lippmann’s consciously guided sustainable future we must remember Arnold’s sense of duty to western history. We must replace beliefs in scientific universalism and multiculturalism with a sense of our western culturism.

To have a futuristic society we must remember our stoic Roman sense of duty to the collective. To have a futuristic society, we need to respect the Protestant moral distinction between irresponsible license and responsible liberty. We must ask with Arnold “What would George Washington do?” or “What would Jesus do?” We must ask what which choices and values will lead to the furtherance the West and its vision of rational self-governance. The West cannot get to Lippmann’s science friendly future without the sense of dedication to Western culture that Arnold advocated.

Tarantino's Anti-Semitic Inglorious Basterds

Quentin Tarantino’s new film, Inglorious Basterds, has been hailed for helping to improve the image of Jews. Instead of being victims, they are for once, the spin is, portrayed as tough. This is the hype. An argument can be made, however, that this film could be seen as an extended anti-Semitic allegory.

The Jews in the Inglorious Basterds are not tough. Brad Pitt has a macho attitude he charmingly spreads throughout the film. But he is not portrayed as a Jewish character. In fact, his nickname is ‘Aldo the Apache.’ He recruits Jews to kill NAZIs. But he himself is not one. The other big killer got broken out of prison. His being Jewish is never established.

The Jewish soldiers are overwhelmingly silent. When being interrogated by the German Colonel Landa, in one of the final scenes, the Jewish character who is captured with Raine sheepishly repeats Raine’s answer rather than formulate and assert his own. Landa then mocks the Jew by letting him know that his nickname among the Germans is ‘The Little Man.’ Sitting next to the defiant, macho, southern Raine and across from the NAZI that captured them, this Jewish character’s masculinity is belittled.

In another scene we are to meet the feared ‘The Bear Jew.’ He is the Jew that the NAZI’s most fear because he beats them to death with a club. We hear his hear his club hitting the walls in a dark tunnel as he slowly comes out to kill an SS officer. When finally emerges, rather than a club he has a baseball bat. After killing the German, he parades around yelling about baseball and hitting one out of the park. He is just a stereotype of an innocent Jewish kid from Brooklyn. The feared Jew is deflated.

The only real Jewish NAZI killer is Shoshana Dreyfus. If one were looking for a vindication of Jewish masculinity, it is interesting to note that the main tough guy is a Jewish woman. The Jewish men who simultaneously kill with her are stock comic figures oafishly pretending to be Italians. Shoshana is the only consistently tough Jewish killer. Showing the Jewish woman as powerful hardly boosts the image of assertive Jewish men.

But Tarantino’s heaviest dose of anti-Semitism comes in the film’s climax. Soshana kills the NAZI high command by burning them to death in the movie theater she owns. While they burn, her face appears on a screen saying, “This is the face of Jewish vengeance.” Since Shoshana made the film, it is projected on the face of the screen, and the screen speaks for her, anti-Semites could interpret this line to mean, “film is the face of Jewish vengeance.” These anti-Semites could easily understand this as an allegory for Jewish control of the media.

For this film to be a parable about Jews and America, the Germans would need to be seen as stand-ins for Americans. The NAZIs in this film make several nasty racist slurs against black people. Since Germans of that time and place had little contact with black people, you would typically attribute such racist anti-black remarks to Americans. Subconsciously, putting American attitudes in NAZI mouths could convince the audience that the NAZIs are stand-ins for white America.

Shoshana angrily and resentfully rejects the love advances of a German (read white) soldier for being a part of the State. Her only real love interest is with her black employee, Marcel. This is offensive to the NAZI power structure and would have, at the time, challenged America’s mores too. Their love appears wholly noble. But Tarantino’s work inviting so much theoretical interpretation causes us to ask, “What is the symbolism?” “What drove Tarantino to make the love interest and co-conspirator black?” Was this, again, an attempt to compare America and NAZI Germany? Unfortunately, the Jewish – Black alliance against the power structure could lend credence to anti-Semetic interpretations.

Shoshana’s passion with Marcel finally erupts in the projection booth just as the couple is about to destroy the racist hierarchy. Thus their transgressive love is nearly projected. In fact, when her vengeance is enacted, they stand on opposite sides of that screen and communicate with each other via a bell. Shoshana stops the NAZI film entitled ‘Nation’s Pride” and projects her vengeful film in its place. Simultaneously Marcel, behind the screen, starts the fire by igniting a large pile of film. Thus anti-Semites could easily see the film as an allegory of Jews destroying the Nation via Jewish the use of white guilt, control of the media, and advocacy of multiculturalism.

My reading of this film may see symbols where none were intended. It is probably not significant that the film that plays while the NAZI hierarchy burns is black and white. But Tarantino is nothing if not a self-reflective auteur. The film’s focus on Goebbels’ use of film to bolster the nation inevitably raises questions about film’s ability to destroy the nation. In a film that has been billed as a Jewish empowerment film, some anti-Semites will notice that the vast majority of the Jewish vengeance happens in a cinema. As one famously obsessed with film theory, Tarantino should have anticipated this potential anti-Semitic interpretation.

Silence = Death: The Culturist Take

"Silence Equals Death" is a slogan of the gay rights movement. In conjunction with this we see the Pink Triangle. The triangle was the symbol homosexuals wore for identification under the Third Reich. Along with Jews, those with birth defects, Jehovah’s Witnesses, communist, and traitors to the State or Hitler, gays were an officially recognized category targeted for camps and death. If one were not silent, homosexuality equaled death under National Socialist rule.

The era proceeding Nazi Germany was the Weimar Republic. In history the name of the ‘Weimar Republic’ is synonymous with decadence. Perhaps you have scene the movie Cabaret. While clever songs regale decadence and social satire, public displays of sexuality provide the constant backdrop. Sexual decadence and homosexual behavior were visible, not closeted, when Hitler rose to power. Silence did not lead to death in this historical example. It is widely recognized that the backlash against public sexual decadence was the toehold upon which Hitler built his NAZI edifice.

If we consider the wisdom of Plato, the constant play between the Apollonian and the Dmonysian in Greek myth or the writings of the NAZI collaborator psychologist Carl Jung, we know that political life swings like a pendulum. When society becomes too constricted it swings back the other way and vice versa. As in managing a Keynesian economic model, you want to forestall extremes to avoid ricocheting extremes. Extreme loudness, public display, as well as the extreme silence imposed by totalitarianism have lead to persecution and death.

This is not to say that the historical oscillation being described has any merit. It is not to claim that in an ideal world public decadence would or would not be celebrated. But this culturist query is arguing that refusing to speak of trends for fear of bad feelings nor ignorance of historical forces will help us consciously guide our destiny and stay clear of the shoals. Basic knowledge helps us. It teaches that moderation leads to moderation. Neither sexual repression nor excessive public sexuality makes for stability. It is time for the sloganeers to recognize that the ‘silence equals death’ equation is false and potentially dangerous.

Culturist Take on Kant

Kant has been called the epitome of the Enlightenment. He wrote a famous work entitled, “What is the Enlightenment.” His ethics come at a time when religion is dying away. Socrates had faced this before Kant. He came up with the famous metaphysical forms of beauty to worship and not degrade for an ethical system. Kant rebelled against such metaphysics. He was a scientist. He created a rational ethical system to replace religion. His system is the basis of the concept of “universal human rights.” Since only the West believes in such systems, thinking they are universal corrodes our sovereignty. Understanding how we got committed to them can help free us from this Kantian trap.

Kant he created a very simple seeming set of ethics because it is logical. But those who study him recognize his nuance. In addition to ethics he wrote about academic freedom, aesthetics, politics, perception, astrophysics, and the philosophical literature in addition to ethics. He created the idea for the predecessor to the United Nations, the League of Nations. He coined the term “League of Nations.” He also invented the logic that underpins the United Nation’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). I will argue that the UDHR is destructive because it does not recognize cultural diversity.

The ethical system of Kant’s, features the “Categorical Imperative.” (CI) This posits the ethical principle that we should figure out what the ethical assumption of your action is. Then you must make it a universal law of the precept and see if you still like it. If you are going to steal a car, the principle might be “would you like to live in a world where people steal other people’s cars?” Could you rationally, looking at your enlightened self-interest, will that to be a universal rule? The answer is no. “You should not steal cars” follows. Thus the CI makes ethical precepts.

Kant then gets into something he calls the kingdom of ends. For an action to be moral, it must be chosen. Things done out of compulsion or cannot be moral. For a choice to be morally decided upon you must have moral autonomy to make that choice. Kant says this gives you personhood, choice is what makes you a person. That means you cannot compel restrictions on a person’s activities and have a moral person. That means that you must treat people, not as means that you control, but of ends – autonomous free ends in and of themselves: respect their right to choose. Autonomous individuals forming society by using the categorical imperative to freely choose society’s rules sans compulsion is the ideal state.

Rationality is the lynch pin of this system. It assumes that everyone is rational. They make the rational choice. And, HERE IS THE FATAL MISSTEP, Kant holds that since all men are rational, as sure as logic is logical, his ethical system is universal. And since his system ultimately gives individual rights, he invents universal individual rights. This concept weakens the West as we are the only culture that believes in it. It undermines our sovereignty in the form of asylum rights. It undermines our borders in that enforcing them infringes upon universal individual rights. This is the flawed Kantian logic behind the U.N.’s vision of universals.

Culturists recognize that there is no universal autonomous rational person. Some people are irrational. And there are different standards of rationality. The Chinese look at the population and say, “WE hold this truth to be self-evident, all men are created UNEQUAL.” And what of Muslims who would still kill to implement theocratic systems Kant assumed dead? What of Islamic Jihad groups who would abuse our freedoms to undermine them? What of gangbangers that do not care about ethics and kills people for a living? Thought systems are divided upon national and cultural lines. For our “logical” rights-bearing system to survive, we must realize that it is rare, precious and fragile. It is not ubiquitous and common. Like other nations, we must be culturist. The West must protect, guide and domestically promote our specific language, culture and borders.

This does not violate our tradition; it is our tradition. From the Puritans to the Founding Fathers, from Abolitionists to progressives, to Prohibition to the 1924 Immigration Act, to the FCC, we have been a culturist nation. Crusades, such as the Civil War and the Great Awakenings fill our history. We must do this in accordance with our cultural traditions. Violating rights to save the system of rights makes no sense. HUAC’s censorship of the movies was wrong. But, America has traditionally regarded our vision as a fragile experiment. We need to recover the sense of individual and collective responsibility this requires. Herein lays the culturist system of ethics. It is grounded in our history. It provides ethics. It recognizes geo-politics and cultural diversity. It stops our destruction via buying into Kant’s universal rights principles.