How Bazaar

By way of playing catch-up on the Kerry/Will/Megan Natalism Debate, I’ll begin with this fundamental McArdlean insight:

Food is awesome, but it is culturally trivial.

Think for a moment — I know I did — about how often it is that big proponents of diversity resort or revert to culinary metaphors. The liberal utopia often appears to be the food court in the Beverly Center, where buyers and sellers of high-end sushi coexist peacefully beside a Nathan’s Hot Dogs, a Panda Express, a Del Taco staffed by authentic Mexican-Americans, and a Haagen Dasz stand. Proudly bourgeois liberal philosophers like Richard Rorty explicitly analogize the ideal public sphere to a big Kuwaiti bazaar, where lots of diverse people collide, converse, and consume the goods they bring to exchange. And as everyone knows, consuming some (possibly) hand-crafted beads is nowhere as awesome as consuming a steaming hot wrap of alien but savory meats or vegetables.

Food, in fact, does this kind of work in liberal theory because it’s the apotheosis of real but meaningless diversity. It is the holy grail of diversity champions, a model for better living: ‘ethnic’ cuisines are as starkly different as tastes and flavors as they are starkly similar as food. The possibilities for contingent variation and recombination are as endless as they are nonthreatening. Wilkinsonian insight:

You’ll eat your szechuan taco pizza and you’ll love it.

Rorty insists that this will never work unless people have the ability to retreat from their great bazaar into petty ‘British clubs’, where they can privately indulge in whatever exclusive affinity groups they like. I’m not so sure Will would go in so easily for that rigidly segregated a private sphere, but in both Rorty and Will’s worlds, food is a prime template for the public sphere precisely because it’s trivial. For liberal market culture, trivial differences are awesome, because they can be harmlessly cultivated in a profitable way by people who freely and equally consume. Food is the first fashion. But when Glaucon famously raises this point in The Republic — bored, the primally prosaic people of the first city will want relishes — it triggers the development of the feverish city, a cosmetopolis that turns with alarming speed to war. The Marxist and MacIntyrean attack on the market amounts to a retelling of this Platonic fable: the celebratory consumption of diverse trivialities produces externalities that are far from celebratory or trivial.

So Will runs into some difficulties writing off some aspects of culture as trivial in order to praise other aspects of culture for being trivial:

I think liberal market culture has such immense, salient rewards (wealth, longevity, happiness, etc.) that it is not only possible to win the argument, but that we are in fact winning it. Of course, part of the winning is dynamist cultural synthesis. So if you’ve got a conservative, zoological view of cultural preservation which fixes on the importance of high-fidelity copying of inessential aspects of a culture’s history (costumes, holidays, rites, cuisine, skin colors etc.), you’re going to have a hard time of it. But if you care about the essential core of liberal modernity, you should be delighted with how things are going.

I know I have to be very careful to admit that wealth, longevity, and happiness are not trivialities. But they certainly and unquestionably depend upon a great collective appreciation for trivialities — a commitment to living in a relatively very trivial society. Wilkinsonian liberals have chosen their table of values and they’re sticking to it, which is well and good, but there’s a high hurdle of hypocrisy set by waving away ‘rites’ — whatever those are — as ‘inessential’ while championing a culture in which the problem of difference is resolved by lifting the trivial formalities of food and fashion to the level of essential rites. If you care about the essential core of liberal modernity, actually, you’ll not only be delighted with your fusion diet but with your fusion clothing and your fusion TV programming and your fusion ethnic makeup and your fusion spirituality and on and on. Just like ethnic cuisine retains its singularity only as a means to the end of trivial recombination, so too do particular costumes, holidays, rites, and skin colors become means to the end of diversity. Trivialization makes diversity possible; you can have diversity without it, of course, but you’ll also have plenty of conflicts, or, in the absence of such conflicts, plenty of social injustices, which liberals become so uncomfortable with that they use politics as a means to the nonpolitical end of wiping out social injustice (that is, trivializing social and cultural differences).

By way of wrapping up, I should be clear that ultimately I much less oppose this liberal market culture than I oppose a lack of frankness about how it pretends its arbitrariness is actually incredibly enlightened and rational. Surely Hobbes was right that it’s better, on balance, to live together than not — for selfish as well as collective reasons. But there’s plenty of gray area between Leviathan and the state of nature, just as there’s plenty of gray area between the tolerance of trivial life its acceptance, or between its acceptance and its fawning celebration. Or, to press the point, between its domestic celebration and its active, concerted, aggressive promotion and expansion around the whole world. Yet, for all the hypocrisy of liberal market culture, its most expansionist boosters can’t seem to tolerate, say, Megan’s preferred hypocrisy:

I’m enough of a cultural relativist to believe that other cultures have a perfect right not to adopt American values, but enough of a cultural hegemonist to know that I want my country to maintain the dominant American culture. I will be thrilled to have new generations of immigrants contributing their music, their food, their religion, their community life–but I do not want them contributing their ideas about the rule of law, or indeed, what constitutes acceptable behavior in a queue.

The ‘rites and costumes’ — for a minute there I almost said ‘decent drapery’ — of our way, in other words, are rather unlike those involved in the supposedly milder ethnic entertainments of song, dance, food, and possibly worship. But notice how already the ‘supposedly milder’ aspect of these things is assumed; essential to our way is that the song refrains from racist vitriol, the dance rules out orgies, the food isn’t dog, and the worship avoids incest. Megan’s distinctions can collapse as troublesomely as Will’s. But they can, with good work and a good conscience, be negotiated and upheld. The question is how that cashes out in real life, and a main part of the answer, as Megan understands, is by having and raising your own children. Insofar as you’re white, as many Americans are, that means having white children, and as far as I’m concerned this is the start and finish of the natalist controversy.

But several strides ahead of us on the Wilkinsonian road, the Madonnas and Brangelinas of the world are busy pursuing the food court theory of reproduction; sometimes your kids will be yours, and sometimes, a la carte, they’ll be selected from an exotic village, the better to be given a very fusion mohawk and American skate-punk duds. How bazaar indeed, and how fatal to a culture that can, when pressed, make its own argument.

(Image of more tiny dining options for the glory of our kind courtesy Flickrer coda.)