Cultural Literacy is not Cultural Purity

Oh, Nantes. How I love thee! Wandering around the city today, I noticed how strangely satisfying cheap towns can be to live in. There’s something soothing about visiting a place named “Cool Burger” and getting a lunch for a few euros that seems to have been constructed by someone with only the most rudimentary knowledge of how food works. Unlike in the big cities, nobody in cheap towns stares at you, one never feels like they’ve been entered into a rich douche-bag fashion show, and there’s more randomness.

There’s also more culture in a very real sense in the small towns. Paris is overflowing with high culture, but Nantes has everything from high to low to just plain weird culture. It’s also considerably more multicultural; the poorer towns attract immigrants from all over, many of whom bring their food and art and music. On my block, there is an African restaurant with remarkably primitive paintings all over the walls, an eastern European bakery whose window display is filled with dozens of Russian nesting dolls like a nest of baby chick Babushkas waiting to be fed by a mother (I like to imagine Stalin feeding them!), an independent theatre/ diner, a blues place where I imagine people sing Les Sarko Blues, and a Mediterranean restaurant with brilliant fired tiles along the wall. It is like the It’s a Small World ride with dog shit and drunks!

Some people complain about “the doctrine of multiculturalism”, but saying that you support multiculturalism now is about as obvious as saying that you support the idea of gravity. Acculturation is inescapable unless you’re rich and it’s really one of the better facts of modern life. It seems important to point out that, after all of our conversations about the western cultural tradition, what we seem to be interested in is not cultural purity, but simply cultural literacy. Cultural purity is a fantasy of obsessive-compulsive small minds, it rarely ever exists, and, worst of all, it’s simply boring (unless, of course, Amish communities fire your imagination). Cultural literacy is a baseline competence in a specific heritage, a connection to that culture serving as the ground for connection to other cultures. It’s also something of a historical sense, I think. It bears repeating that the last thing that could threaten the survival of a living culture is contact with other cultures; the history of human civilizations suggests that the opposite is the case. And the few “pure” cultures are still living in huts.

And I think it goes without saying that the first thing you notice about the defenders of “cultural purity”, who always seem to imagine a culture as some sort of fragile biological entity that arises spontaneously but which can be infected by other cultures and destroyed, is that they generally seem to be cultural illiterates.