Meditations on the Marriage of World Cultures

By Frederick Turner

ANYONE WHO WALKS THE STREETS or campuses of the new tier of world-cities will be struck by the fantastic combinations of races in friendship, marriage, work, and study. My son, born in America, is half British and half Chinese; he plays baseball with a Slav from Poland and an Arab from Algeria; I eat at French/Lebanese, Thai, Salvadorean, and Israeli/Chinese restaurants, buy software from emigrant South Africans, celebrate the Zoroastrian New Year with Farsi friends from Iran, and collaborate on artistic and intellectural projects with a Macedonian Yugoslav, a Greek, a Hungarian Jew, a Japanese, a Latin American, and several Germans. Yet in a strange way the place I live in does not cease at all to be Texas to the core. Cultural information not only has the property of being transferable without loss, but also of being almost infinitely superimposable. Many cultures can occupy the same place or brain without loss; there seems to be no cultural equivalent of the Pauli Exclusion Principle, which forbids two particles from existing in the same energy state and place at the same time.

What is the meaning of this unparalleled mixing that has been going on in recent years among the world's cultures? Interculturalism itself comes in a bewildering variety of genres, each with its own pressing and highly ambiguous set of moral and epistemological questions. Consider this brief and incomplete list of intercultural genres: tourism, international charity, evangelism, colonial administration, anthropology, true trade (as opposed to mercantile colonialism), political and military contacts, academic consultation and exchange, artistic collaboration, artistic influence, political asylum, statelessness, refugeeism, education abroad, intermarriage, and emigration.

Of course any celebration of a new era of tolerance and ethnic harmony would be premature. The collapse in our century of the great empiresthe Austrian, the Turkish, the British, the Soviet, and soon the Chinesehas left large areas of the world in a state of Balkanized tribalism and nationalist hostility, and it well may appear that we are further away than ever from the interculturalism we anticipate. It may even seem a decadent luxury to trouble our conscience with the problems of cultural mixing when such a foul-tempered resurgence of racism and ethnocentrism is under way.

But from another perspective these horrible events are belated but inevitable consequences of world forces that will eventually lead to a more comfortably intercultural world. The great empires held those tensions in an artificial stasis, and now they are playing themselves out naturally. In this view the eventual result of the enormous mobility of persons and information will be something like the condition of the United States or the European Common Market; or like those countries which, having once possessed colonial empires, now have had their homelands peacefully invaded by their erstwhile subjects and find that together with the inevitable stress, there is also a surge of cultural revitalization that is not unwelcome.

Perhaps the most remarkable fact of the modern world is that for the first timein just the last two decadesall the member cultures of the human race have finally come to know of each other, and have, more or less, met. There really is no human Other now. Clearly, the ethnocentrism of the old right and of political conservatism in general cannot survive the enormous influx of information from the rest of the world. Of course, our urge to demonize the Other has not gone away, whether the other is black or white, female or male, left-wing or right-wing; it has even sometimes been artificially displaced to other species and even to some of our more human-like machines. But the urge must now contend with the logic of history, technology, and economics.

The formal complexity of interculturalism has not prevented some of our bolder, and paradoxically, more conventional, intellectuals from seeking to cut the gordian knot of the problem with the sword of neoleftist analysis. A very crude reduction of their position might go like this: the rich are bad, and the poor are good. The rich got rich by exploiting the poor, and then by rigging the cultural value system to justify their privileges. The same goes for nations as well as for individuals. Nowadays, the old form of international expropriation, colonialism, has been partly replaced by a new form, whereby the bad (rich, powerful, white, male, etc.) expropriate the cultural property of the good (poor, weak, etc.). This theory attacks anthropologists, collectors of tribal art, tourists, Western followers of Oriental religions, white jazz enthusiasts, performance artists who use foreign traditional artistic and ritual techniques, and even male collectors of quilts and women's arts, as expropriators of the cultural goods of others. Recently, the singer David Byrne was attacked by Rolling Stone magazine for "ripping off' Hispanic music in his new album. Critics of contemporary culture are thus claiming that cultural exchange is a form of economic exploitation.

But at least implicitly the left now recognizes culture as having real economic value of its own, rather than simply being a smokescreen to conceal the true, economic, facts of coercion, power, and control; for otherwise the parallel between economic exploitation and cultural appropriation would have no meaning. If culture is a kind of goods that can be stolen by the powerful, then it is a goods.

Some kind of plausibility might be constructed for the economic/cultural exploitation argument. But a few further examples serve to show how flimsy it is. Consider Japan's success in exporting its products, including much of its material and spiritual culture, to the United States. The expropriation model, to be consistent, would imply that the United States was expropriating the cultural property of Japan. More absurd still, the enormous penetration of American music, movies, television, soft drinks, sports activities, and consumer goods into many of the poorer Asian, African, and Latin American countries would have to be interpreted as the expropriation on a huge scale of American cultural property by Third World cultural colonists.

Ah, but that's different, the determined neo-Leninist might say. But how is it diflerent? Every answer leads to greater and greater betrayals of socialist articles of faith, some of them shared by all people of good will. Is it that the poor benighted natives (or poor benighted Americans) are in an unequal cultural contest and ought to be protected for their own good from our (or Japan's) potent and corrupting forms of cultural firewater? Besides being rather condescending, this arguemnt is virtually identical to that of the supporters of apartheid in South Africa. Or is it that the terms of the exchange are unfairthat the Third World does not get a fair price for its cultural goods, while we gouge them for ours? This argument assumes either that there is some ultimate authority that decides which cultural goods are more valuable, ours or theirs, and does not trust either our valuation of relative value or theirs; or that there might be such a thing as a fair trade (and thus the possibility of a free market, entrepreneurism, and the whole capitalist ensemble). And if we use the JapanU.S. example, it is the cheapness, not the dearness, of Japanese goods that is the problem. When it comes down to it, the only difference between being culturally expropriated and conducting cultural imperialism is who we thought in the first place were the good guys and the bad guys.

The whole argument is based on a misleading analogy between cultural goods and industrial goods; which in turn is based on ignorance of the diflerence between information and matter. If matter is transferred to another location it ceases to exist at its first location. Moreover, it takes work to make the transfer, and if that work is paid for out of the matter that is being transferred, one ends up with less matter at the point of arrival than at the point of origin. A steamship gets to its destination lighter than when it left its home port. However, if information is transferred, it not only remains where it started, but it is not necessarily diminished by its travels. The sender of information by radio does not cease to know what she knew when she sent it offin the message; and the message can be made redundant enough to include an arbitrarily diminishing amount of error.

In the mysterious realm of physics which deals with the thermodynamics of information, the energy cost to a computational systemthat is, a system which does work by creating and/or transferring informationis in theory incurred only when it comes time to destroy the excess information that has built up in the system. Thus, one could in theory design a process for mass-producing pieces of information, whose only expense would be erasing the tape afterwards. If information is a kind of goods, then it is one which costs the maker nothing to make but which obliges its consumer to find an expensive waste-disposal system for the purchase once it is used. The logic and justice of such a transaction are almost unknown to contemporary economics, and the laws of intellectual property lag woefully behind the astonishing expansion of information-space that is now taking place in the world.

Yet do we not recognize in these goods, which it costs virtually nothing to buy but which clutter up the house and alarm environmentalists when we try to dispose of them, an increasing proportion of our own property? And if we are cultural workers, do we not recognizethough unwillingly, because it concedes how much fun our work isthose goods we create but cost us nothing to do so? And is not cultural property much more the kind that costs nothing to make or buy, that does not decay but is hard to get rid of, than the old kind, dear to Marxists and Capitalists alike, that costs the groaning labor of workers to produce, which they lose by giving to us and must be compensated for, and which wears out only too swiftly as we consume it?

It is the "expropriators" of cultural goods, then, not their creators, who are exploited. And thus the expropriation explanation collapses in absurdity.

But this meditation has already generated issuesor created information which it would be interesting to pursue. For instance, if it costs cultural creators nothing to produce their goods, why should they be paid? This question is not as trivial as it might appear; for as automation performs more and more repetitive and mechanical work that used to be done by humans, all workers will approach the economic condition of artists. And a theory that bases value on labor will be totally inadequate. An artist, for instance, may labor very hard at versification, draughtsmanship, secretarial detail, athletic training, or musical technique; but what we value most highly in the productions of artists is precisely that which transforms their labor into an addictive joy, which they would seek out whether they were paid or not. We do not pay artists for their labor: a bad artist may labor more tenaciously than a good one, but produce worth less results, as Peter Schaffer eloquently demonstrated in his play Amadeus. Yet if they were not paid, we would not have cultural producers, which would be a pity; even artists have to eat. Somehow there must be a medium and a method of exchange between cultural goods and the material goods which, as we say, keep body and soul together.

Another problem: If it is the audience for cultural goods that is doing the workerasing the tapthen shouldn't they, too, be paid? Do we not already pay them, in fact, by subsidizing out of the public purse the cost of using the library, the museum, the symphony, the university, the theater? The poorest persons in our society have cheap access to a large part of the cultural riches of the worldcertainly to a larger part of it than would an ancient emperor or Renaissance duke. And if we pay both cultural producers and cultural consumers, who foots the bill? Can money itself, in such an economy, "grow on trees" the way information clearly can? But can we retain our traditional respect for artists and other cultural producers if we pay them despite the fact that, as artists (rather than draughtsmen, clerks, or athletes) they do no work; and that we pay audiences to go and see them, and to selectively forget what they haue seen and heard ? Can we replace the matterbased, or industriallybased, model of respect with another more suited to the new age that is coming? Obviously, artists do indeed do something like what we used to call work, and their audience receives the most valuable goods of all; but the many jokes and tragic stories about working parents who do not want their children to grow up to be layabout artists also have a grain of truth.

These economic paradoxes are not problems only for the cultural and information economies. Indeed matter cannot be transferred without cost; but to what extent are we actually buying matter even when we buy a thing as solid as a car or a washing machine? In fact, increasingly, we're buying a very complicated and effective piece of information. The matter doesn't matter: some of the steel in my car was actually once a washing machine, and before that, another car. When my car no longer holds its information, I may pay someone to tow it away. What formwhat informationthe factory put into the matter is what counts. I wouldn't want or pay for a lump of steel; what I buy is the information the factory put into the steel, information increasingly transferred by robot machines without human labor. Steel itself is a kind of information imposed by atomic and crystalline structure upon neutrons, protons, and electrons. Traditional economics still depends on the need for information to be embodied in, and thus tagged by, the matter of its incarnation; just as traditional copyright law still depends on the physical means of publication. The debate in Congress which took place in 1989 over the importation from Japan of cheap highquality digital tape recording machines shows that we have almost reached the limits of the old kind of economics, and the old kind of thinking, altogether.

By "old" I do not mean here ancient and preindustrial, but rather pertaining to the conventional economic wisdom of modern societies. In fact we may have to resort to the thoughtways of traditional or folk societies, in combination with new imaginative constructs from the age of information, to be able to make sense of the new economics. Much of the riches of an ancient person was what she had in her head, as information; and as the new age develops, much oi our riches will be in the form of totally in~tangible informa" tion contained in, but not confinable to, our cybernetic men tal prostheses. As I write it, this essay becomes an immaterial process constituted by the interaction between my nervous system as I watch the screen of the word-processor, and a set of electromagnetic relations in its random access memory. But I still think of it as a text on paper, or at least as a picture of one. My son spurns the electric racing cars that I, as a boy, would have coveted, and prefers the meaningful pattern of electric charges embedded int the silicon of a computer video game. The computer game itself is not a picture of any thing that ever was, in the modern sense of "thing." In a sense, my son is a more tribal person than I am, even though I have had access through traditional humane learning to the ancient tribal sources of nonmaterialist economicsor should I say "oeconomics," in the traditional sense of housekeeping?

We may even, as we evolve towards an economics more like that of traditional societies than like that of our recent modern past, come to a wiser appreciation of their ethics and aesthetics. For such societies, true riches are within; nobody can copyright a great poem because everybody knows it by heart; the chief value that society possesses is the informationthe skills of beauty, weaving, prophecy, storytelling embodied in the limbs and nervous systems of its Helens, its Cassandras, and its Penelopes.

Already the West is getting tired of mere consumer goods, of commodities. On our urban beltways we can now find business establishments that rent storage space so that we can get rid of our possessions without ceasing to possess them. Possession is becoming very abstract. Our best possessions are empty space and time. We are becoming a "service economy" rather than a manufacturing economy. Ironically, it is often those critics of American societyliberal economists and socialist political philosopherswho are most critical of our materialism, that are also most vocal in deploring the decay of our factories and the movement toward those intangible forms of economic activity we label "services." But perhaps their complaints are inconsistent. Are we not becoming at last literally less materialistic? Should we not prefer service to things? The Japanese themselves, the heroes of manufacturing, are now rushing to export their manufacturing function to the little dragons of the Pacific rim; the socialist bloc has gone broke trying to hang on to a manufacturing economy. Having persuaded the rest of the world to become harried producers and consumers of material goods, we may in a generation or two have so transformed ourselves by our information technology that we will have become the wise old sages, like Yoda in Star Wars, counseling brash, driven, young Asians on the mysterious ways of spiritual enlightenment and the traditional wisdom of the body electric. Already artists like Seichi Ozawa and Akira Kurosawa are finding the West more hospitable than their bottomline oriented homeland to their artistic and spiritual visions.

We would seem to be approaching a time when cultural goods are going to be the only kind there are, and material matter itselfwill have dissolved into a brilliant and pliable haze of interpenetrating probability domains. New forms of manufacturing, such as nanotechnology and biotechnology, are on the horizon, that will radically transform our conception of matter. The requirements and luxuries of physical existence, according to the prophets of the new technologies, will be supplied byself-reproducing, self-programming, and independently-foraging Von Neumann machines, nanotechnological miniature factories invisible to the naked eye. Those unseen agencies will be much like what ancient cultures and classical civilizations called spirits, genii loci, kamis, naiads, dryads, angels, nymphs, dakkinis, demons, gremlins. Nature is already full of such entities: the bacteria which ferment our cheeses, the DNA of plants and animalsbut they are the results of evolution unassisted by conscious awareness. We ourselves, most potent of wood demons, came about when our own consciousness, expressed and mediated by our kinship rules and mating rituals, took a hand in evolution. Now we have begun to extend that conscious hand to the evolution of the rest of nature.

What kind of world economy will come out of the changes I am describing? Perhaps the closest analogy might be the Homeric economy, the world of gift-giving, hospitality, the ritualization of obligation, sacrifice, deed as performance, and bardic commemoration of deeds that we find in the Odyssey and the niad Such an economy is the only kind that makes sense when matter is no longer a reliable numerical index of value. That ancient world was one explicitly conceived as densely populated with intention, spirits, local deities, and so on. The value of a sword or shield was the weight of story, of software, that it borethe density of information, of spirit, embodied in Achilles' sevenfold shield is both what makes it a good shield and what identifies it as of divine make. Odysseus' story, the tale he brings back from the sack of Troy, is worth to the Phaeaceans a shipload of treasure; and those treasures themselves are worth only the stories stamped and embedded in them. Homer's own living is his tale.

But there is no copy-protection on this story-information. Thus no system of contracts, patent and copyright laws, bills of sale, and specie-backed currency, can ensure an orderly and just disposal of such goods if they are conceived of as material commodities. The only thing that cannot be copied in Homer's story is the power and immediacy of his own performance of it, his personal presence, that which cannot be measured as a commodityhis gift, as we say.

Homer's world is an economy of sacrifices, performance, and gifts; the greatest profit consists in the greatest sacrifice, the act or deed is not just the legal sign but the reality, the limits of this economy are not how much one is prepared to give in exchange for what one wants, but how little. It is the predatory givers of that world, the masters of the potlatch and the holocaust (in the old sense) that are the greatest dangers, not, as in the world of mercantile colonialism and early capitalism, the predatory takers. To take Troy, Agamemnon must first have given his own daughter Iphigenia. Beware of the Greeks when they come bearing gifts, especially Trojan Horses. According to an ancient etymology the gift (in English) may also be poison, "das Gift" (in German); the rhinegold is the kiss of death. Life is the performance, and thus the death, of the hero.

Where the analogy between the future and Homer's universe breaks down is of course in those aspects of ancient Greece that really have been set behind us by the ratchet of historical memory. It was a martial universe, one in which a violent rabble of young male heroes confronted a violent and uneasy patriarchy, contending over, and divided radically from, that third mysterious indoors world of the matriarchy, of white arms and weaving and procreativeness and terrifying protected personal subtlety. Since that time Christ has come, we have learned to love our neighbor (and to send to the gas-chambers those who do not subscribe to the rationale of that love!), and to extend the idea of equality to all human creatures, male and female (except our children!). The point of the analogy is that a hard, real-feeling, complex world does exist in Homer in which nobody buys anything from, or sells anything to, anyone else. As such it is an imaginable human world based on gifts, on performance, on the exchange of informational goods. And such a world may now be approaching.

Already in our own time it is the entertainersthe popsingers, film stars, sports heroes who create cultural informationthat are the highest-status members of society, and often the richest. One year Paul McCartney was the richest person in England after the Queen. Ancient princes might well be described as the great public entertainers of their times, the sacrificial superstars whose exploits formed the basis of the stories that ~ave meaning to life. Agamemnon steps upon the magic carpet woven by Queen Clytemnestra, and his blood nourishes a cycle of storiesconcentrated informationthat define the wealth ofthe archaic Greek economy. John Lennon dies for our sins. We elect an actor for our king and watch while he is resurrected from the wound of the assassin's bullet; and so according to the logic of mythology, a dead king is reborn and the pollution of his death in Dallas is purlfied.

How might the Homeric/cybernetic economy work between cultures, rather than within one? In Homer, if the hero comes across a tribe that is sufficiently barbarous as to be no part of the Greek world, the only possible relation he can have with it is as its food or indeed as its proto-colonialist expropriator: consider Odysseus' encounters with the Laestrygonians and the Cyclopes. For us, the whole world is as a Hellenized Mediterranean. What universal solvents will ensure the liquidity and translatability of cultural value? What new problems and dangers will be spawned by our very success? How do we preserve the cultural differences that we value?

The first of these questions, about universal solvents, requires some explanation. The human mind, and human culture in general, has admirable powers of compartmentalization. As any teacher knows who has experienced the coexistence in a student' mind of contradictory information (for instance, astronomical, biological, and geological book-learning together with a belief in the literal Biblical account of creation), "cut and dried" knowledge can leave the mind virtually unscathed. Contradictions do not even consciously arise; such knowledge has its own cocoon of insulation. To change the metaphor, the mixing of colors, or the metabolism of a ferment, or chemical reactions, or cookery, cannot take place without a liquid medium that presents the dissolved or suspended elements intimately and extensively against one another. Dry paints cannot mix.

The ready availability of multicultural information is not enough in itself to initiate the mysterious alchemy of interculturalism, whether that alchemy is the change in an individual's value system, or a transformation in the economic system and its underpinning of copyright law. All past bigotries and ethnocentrisms have coexisted with some, even much, information about other cultures. What is needed, and what our age has supplied, is a group of solvents that can serve as a common medium for all kinds of cultural information and insure that whatever processes of transformation they can engender in each other will actually happen. What are those solvents?

Most obvious, perhaps, is the instantaneous medium provided by worldwide telecommunications, especially television. There is a peculiar difference between radio and television in this respect, which has been ignored by the critics of television. Curiously enough, it was the age of radio which saw the last great spasmodic surge in nationalism, ethnocentrism, dictatorship, and mass ideology. It was radio that broadcast the mystagogic rant of Hitler, the brutal rhetoric of Stalin, the tirades of Franco and Mussolini. In a sense, the Allied Powers in the Second World War were lucky in getting as leaders Roosevelt, Churchill, and de Gaulle, who had a patrician loyalty to democracy, because the power that radio and its associated technologies provided them might well have been a temptation to dictatorship.

Even though television, like radio, is a broadcast medium, and thus would seem to favor the domination of a passive mass audience by a great authoritative voice, the nature of the visual medium subtly undermines the power and impressiveness of those who would use it. Somehow, if we can see the man live, see the play of expression on his face, his mortal human body taking up space in the world, turning its back, stumbling on the helicopter steps like Gerald Ford's, or dropping the banquet morsel from its chop sticks as Deng Xiaoping's did recently on television, then we cannot take his speeches very seriously. Part of it is that we can see how old he is. If he is old, we see the signs of decrepitude; if young, we feel superior to the fellow. I use the masculine pronoun here because, very signficantly, female leaders do not seem to be afflicted by the television feet of clay. The great warlords of the recent past have often been women: Golda Meir, Indira Gandhi, Chiang Ching, Margaret Thatcher. In the film medium, as Leni Riefenstahl knew, the visual awkwardness can be more or less edited out, but live television is fatal to a demagogue. The only U.S. president to use television well was, sign)ficantly, a film actor. Knowing the medium, Ronald Reagan could use its deficiencies for his own purposes, and gain sympathy by playing subtly against his own mortal infirmities. His enemies did not realize this, and the more they attacked his apparent deafness, inattention, and wandering memory, the more affection he got. But it was affection, not obeisance.

Television is a humanizing medium, and a leveler. It also transcends, as radio does not, the barriers of language. That was why the students in Tienanmen square put up their statue to Democracy: as a visual symbol that would speak across the variety of languages both in the world at large and in China itself, where dozens of different languages are spoken. The man who stopped the tanks was making an utterance that is universally human. Television is thus a solvent for all cultural differences.

In the long run, other telecommunication media may be even more potent as solvents. Though the telephone is languagebound, it is not a broadcast medium, and thus, while enabling diverse populations within a language community to exchange ideas, cannot be used for domination of populations. Wiretapping is not a commensurate compensation for the authorities, as the Polish government tacitly admitted eight years ago when, after declaring martial law and outlawing Solidarity, it closed down the telephone exchanges,thus foregoing the potentially valuable intelligence it might have got by listening in. The facsimile or fax machine, as the Chinese students found, is becoming another strong solvent, especially when there is a language problem. Here a picture is worth a million words. Computer logic and computer languages have begun to erode the acoustic language barrier, and perhaps eventually artificial intelligence may make possible the cybernetic translation of natural languages. In any case, the growth of telecommunications has tended to reinforce the development of the English language itself as a lingua franca and thus as a universal solvent. The expansion of English by the addition of hundreds of thousands of international scientific and technical words (themselves based on the old lingua francas of Latin and Greek) is part of this trend. We will deal later with the explosion of devices for recording and playing music, and the effect this has had on cultural liquidity.

Related to the cultural solvent of telecommunications, and technically based on it, has been the emergence of international financial markets, and the multinational corporations. Through new kinds of financial and investment inatruments, ownership by union and pension funds of foreign securities, and the worldwide accessibility of government bonds issued by many nations, large numbers of ordinary people now own substantial property in other countries. In fact there already exists a loose and tacit world currency composed of a combination of the old petrodollars, the U.S. budget deficit, and Third World debt. The world as a whole has discovered what Britain and America found in the late eighteenth century: the virtues of debt as a means of capital formation, its tendency to liquefy fixed assets and to put to work unused capital tied up in the real property of nations and, more intangibly, in the talents and education of their peoples and even in the probable political stability of their future.

Out of this world liquidity of value has come new institutions, especially the multinational corporations. These entities constitute the first examples of the true world citizen. This is not to say that they are especially virtuous; but for them there is no escape, the world itself being their field of action. They cannot emigrate, and thus their loyalty must be to the world as a whole. The welfare of a citizen of a nation is partly bound up with the welfare of that nation, and thus that citizen's vote will be motivated partly toward the national benefit, a motivation that mitigates his or her special interests. When citizens of the world are numerous and powerful enough, there will emerge a political quality akin to patriotism, an identification of one's own interests with those of the whole globe.

Another universal solvent is the global ecological crisis and the increasing awareness that it cannot be resolved by purely national means. Such threats as nuclear accidents like the one at Chernobyl, acid rain, the depletion of the ozone layer, species extinctions, and the greenhouse effect (with the accompaniment of global warming or a new ice age, depending on whose theories you accept) are world problems and require the liquefaction of different legal, industrial, and agricultural traditions in order to produce cooperative action. Related to this perceived crisis is the global danger of nuclear war and nuclear winter (or nuclear summer, according to some theorists). It is perhaps a blessing in disguise that the feedback mechanisms by which such changes might actually change the environment are as yet poorly understood. Even if alarm is misdirected, it is at least shared.

One of the most creative and positive solvents in world culture is the almost universal acceptance among the world's elites of the emerging scientific account of the universe. Here, though, there are dismaying counterforces: on both the right and the left there has been a backlash against the challenge and the cognitive expansion demanded by new developments in science. Evolution, for instance, is under attack by religious fundamentalists on one side, and by left-wing social determinists on the other, both anxious to avoid the responsibilities of creative and moral action demanded by the relationship between human nature and nature in general. The relaxation of social discipline brought about by cultural pluralism has itself been partly responsible for the new anti-science atmosphere. The hard disciplines of logic and mathematics, and the self-restraint and self-criticism required by scientific method, are now out of reach of many who, in a stricter academic climate, might have acquired the rudiments of them and so been liberated.

Nevertheless, science will surely win the race between enlightenment and reaction, because those societies and groups within society which have mastered science will generally be more effective, inventive, and moral than those which have not, and will thus have greater powers of cultural survival. "More moral," by the way, because more capable of self-examination.

The last, and in some ways the most intriguing, of the great solvents is the rhythm of contemporary popular music, specifically "rock music." Originating in a fertile combination of the sophisticated African musical tradition with European and Latin American elements, a new musical medium emerged in the Sixties which is perhaps the most potent, because the most fundamental, of all forces for change. For many years jazz and blues coexisted with classical and folk music; but gradually a mutual translation took place. The names of Scott Joplin, the Gershwins, Leonard Bernstein, Bob Dylan, the Beatles, and now David Byrne and Philip Glass, chart the process of development. One recalls moments of musical insight in it: "West Side Story," Procul Harum's "A Whiter Shade of Pale," which was simultaneously real Bach and the most psychedelic pop, George Harrison's adaptations of Indian sitar music, Paul Simon's work with South Africa's Ladysmith Black Mombaso, Glass's "Satyagraha" and "Koyannisqaatsi."

Essentially what happened was that a very simple, pan-human rhythmic beat was discovered, of no musical merit in itself, to which the music of all world cultures could be set and which served as a liquid medium that would enable musical syncretism to take place. What has followed has been a worldwide musical revolution, where a record made in London by a talented Indian singer using a reggae base and Brazilian arrangements will in'duence young Nigerian, Czech, and Japanese rock groups, and perhaps form part of the raw material for a new classical opera. The extraordinary phenomena of glasnost and democracy in Eastern Europe and the Far East may have as much to do with the universality of rock and roll music as with anything else. This is not a praise of rock in itself, which is a rather insipid form of sound; but rock has been like alcohol, which can serve as the base for the most exquisite blends of perfume, the most delicate liqueurs.

The world of Homer and his Odysseus is one united by a liquid medium, literally that universal solvent that we call the ocean, that Homer called the polyphloisboiou thalasses, the multitudinouslydowing sea. The ambivalent and twofaced god of that medium, Poseidon, is the key problem of the Odyssey. The poem is about oars, about how to use the destructive element, as Stein calls it in Lord Jim, to do creative work and to get home with the story of Troy. The trouble with a universal solvent is what to use as a containment vessel. If the solvent is truly universal, it will melt through any walls which try to hold it in. The solution to this riddle is the solution to the problems of our times. It is, essentially, the one barrier which stands in the way of those scientists attempting to achieve nuclear fusion, and thus a cheap, inexhaustible, and clean source of energy for all humankind. In physics, the universal solvent is a plasma. What bottle can contain this genie? Uncontained, it is the principle of th. greatest threat to humanity, the hydrogen bomb. Contained it is the potential hearth of us all.

Interestingly enough, the best solutions suggested so far for the containment of this Thunderer, this Poseidonic universal solvent, is to use it as its own container, either by allowing it to power and to control an electromagnetic field that will constrain it, or by using it as an inertial jet-propulsion force to collapse it into a state of such great density that it begins to produce more energy than it consumes. If we accept this answer to the riddle as having mythic force for the containment of the intercultural plasma, we must look for ways in which interculturalism will be self-controlling, or can be induced to enter turbulent but stable feedback states that maintain themselves. But first we must look more carefully at the dangers and diseases of the new informational economy that is emerging.

What are the main problems of interculturalism? One is immediately obvious: the issue of authenticity. It arises most clearly, perhaps, in the experience of tourism for both the tourist and the local population which serves and is photographed by the tourist. More subtly, but more disturbingly to the intellectual and artist, are such questions as: How authentic is my claim as an anthropologist to speak for the autochthones? Can I justify my ethnodramatic performance of their rituals? This haiku or Noh play I have written, or in which I am performingis it genuine? Is my Buddhism authentic? Or again, how am I to feel about the modern factories on the outskirts of Athens, or the Kentucky Fried Chicken on Tienanmen Square? Or Japanese baseball and squaredancing? Or Zimbabwean rock and roll? Or my Viet namese student's appreciation of the novels of Jane Austen

The problem is fundamentally connected to the charac teristic reproducibility of cultural (informational) goods: th. fact that, unlike material objects, they are not destroyed a the point of origin when they are transferred to anothe place. When our fundamental model of the nature of cu tural goods is pieces of matter, there can only be one original of anything. In other words, we can only worry about authenticity if we are materialists. A materialist knows that if there are two copies of something, at least one of them must be a fake. (Similarly, if two things apparently occupy the same place, at least one of them must be an illusion.)

The same suspicion can be found among materialist lovers of nature. For them, a restored or artificial prairie can never be a real prairie. What they ignore is that all living things are by nature copies: reproduction is part of the definition of life. Nor does nature even bother to copy correctly. Evolution can only take place because the copies are incorrect, and thus there is variation in a species, upon which natural selection can work. According to a materialist definition of nature, all life is inauthentic!

But suppose one understood culture to be, like nature, in its very essence a process of not-quite-correct copying, of transfer, of sexual and asexual recombination, of merging, mixing, miscegenation, and the mutual appropriation of information? Those who are nostalgic for the certainty of being they imagine among les trrstes tropiques propose models of authenticity that are essentially closed semantic systems, hermeneutic circles impenetrable to any stranger. What they fail to take into account is that such systems must be as impenetrable and closed to their own younger generation as to any anthropological outsider. To put it another way, culture must always reproduce itself by indoctrinating its children, who start off as strangers; and irreversible slippage will happen in the process. The indoctrinators will be compelled to develop a subversive meta-consciousness of their own cultural material if only in deploying, enumerating, and organizing it so as to teach it and leave nothing out. The human child, as we know from the rapid change in all living languages, delights in creative misreadings and playful inversions; and the human adolescent is hormonally programmed to question and subvert the wisdom of the elders.

In the strict, materialist definition of authenticity, then, there is no such thing as cultural authenticity; so we must, since authenticity is a valuable concept, look for definitions other than uniqueness, untransferability, cultural or natural indigenousness. Authenticity must be sought, where Jesus enjoined us to judge, by the fruits of something rather than its grounds. Authenticity is moral, artistic, and intellectual power; there is a lesser authenticity also in sheer economic effectiveness. Contain the plasma in the plasma; let the problem of authenticity become the authentic and central theme of the work.

How does this solution apply to the uncomfortable tourist? Here it is a matter of art. If the tourist is there for good, deep, complex reasons, and if the host country or city has a coherent aesthetic of what it means to entertain tourists, there need be no inauthenticity. The city of Stresa, on Lake Maggiore, has been entertaining tourists, mostly in the summer from sweltering Rome, for the past two thousand years and has got very good at it. It would be inauthentic for the town to do anything else. And although the reasons its pilgrims might give for their visit have changed, Delphi is no more inauthentic now than it was when Oedipus consulted the oracle there three thousand years ago.

How do we get from cultural ethnocentrism to true interculturalism? The first step in the process usually involves institutions of which many now disapprove: empire, religious evangelism, and colonialism. Curiously enough, in order to break out of the bounds of their cultural limitations most peoples have had to pass through one of two morally evil experiencesof being dominated by a foreign cultural hegemony, or of being the hegemonic dominator. India and England are good examples. It is hard to say which experience is the more damaging in the long run, but the damage is necessary. It is the trauma suffered by any structure when it first encounters its corrosive, Poseidonic solvent. Very occasionally this first step can be accomplished when a group of refugees or emigrants which shares a common alienation from its parent cultures is able to band together to form a union, as did the American settlers; but even here a common hegemonic culture, embodied in the Enlightenment reasoning of the Constitution, was required. In effect, the hegemonic culture must be the solvent, and the experience of one's own worldview as solvent is a profoundly unsettling one, manifested eventually in a kind of collective guilt, inertia, and anomie.

What follows the first stage, of hegemony, is what we might call naive relativism. Just like a child who discovers one exception to a rule, and who in a kind of cynical dudgeon dismisses the validity of all rules, so a culture at this stage, having found that its own rules are not universal, assumes a total cultural relativity of all rules. This phase actually comes from a generous impulse, itself the product of the colonial administrator's or anthropologist's need to develop an ethic of impartiality and selfcriticism (or of an equally generous recognition by members of an oppressed colonial people that their oppressor's culture has its own sense and beauty). The effect is that the primary stance of the anthropologist, of respect for other cultures, becomes partly disseminated throughout the population.

Sometimes this stance is adopted strategically, for the worst of reasons: as an excuse for hedonism and a relaxation of the demands and duties of adult human life. Margaret Mead's Samoa and the photographs of the naked tribespeople in National Geographic became in this way just)fications for the "playboy philosophy." The Huichol peyote cult served a similar function a few years later. Difference is interpreted as licence, as permission; the very strict moral and ritual rules of traditional societies are ignored. Another use for cultural relativism is in its guise as cultural determinism. If a person's success in life is the result of overriding cultural forces, usually perceived as oppressive, then those who perceive themselves as unsuccessful have the advantage of being able to claim that it was not their own efforts that were at fault, but society; and that society owes them, regardless of their personal character or contribution, a handsome restitution.

Though superficially attractive, relativism is not a coherent intellectual position. Either it is uniquely, absolutely, and exclusively true, and thus the shattering exception to its own rule that all truth is relative; or it is no more true than any other intellectual position, in which case the absolutism of, say, Hitler's Germany or Khomeini's Iran is just as intellectually acceptable as is relativism. Interestingly enough, it was on these grounds that Derrida was unable to condemn apartheid as roundly as his critics wished, and there were some intellectuals who found it difflcult, for similar reasons, to condemn the Ayatollah's death sentence against Salman Rushdie.

Naive relativism is still a reigning ideology in the American academy, enshrined in what some have called "oppression studies" or "victimology." The general population, though, has to some extent moved on to a more mature perspective. One of the oddities of our time is how in many humanistic and social-science fields the academy has ceased to lead the national consciousness, and has begun to drag behind it; rather as the Anglican clergy moved from being in the forefront of consciousness in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (witness Donne, Herbert, Herrick, and Swift) to being the butt of literary jokes in the nineteenth and twentieth.

The more mature perspectivethe third phase in the intellectual passageis what we might call pluralism: the acceptance and recognition of cultural difference and a commitment to coexistence and to a worldview that is not unified but diverse and disseminated. If it is objected that the general population is not as sophisticated as this, we may point to the values embodied in the most popular and even vulgar TV shows"Donahue," "All in the Family," "Perfect Strangers," "Night Court," and so onin which pluralism and tolerance have become not just one of a number of important ethical norms, but the supreme, even the exclusive one. In such programs the ideal end result is always the uncritical acceptance of di~erent lifestyles and of relative morality. This ideal of tolerance is indeed rather noble, and contrasts tellingly with the sometimes vicious exclusivism of academic factions, which one would suppose to be providing intellectual and moral leadership. The sheep, alas, are well in advance of the shepherds.

But pluralism itself has certain profound problems. One is that we are not neurally organized to perceive the world in a fundamentally pluralistic way. Even if, say, we were to prove to our satisfaction that the vision of the compound insect eye gave a more accurate picture of things than the single eye of a human being, there is not much one could do about it. In actual fact, of course, a large part of an insect's brain is devoted to integrating all of its different views into a single program of action; and in another sense we humans do indeed have compound eyes, made of millions of retinal neurons, but again integrated into a single worldview by the visual cortex. The universe itself has, by overwhelming selective pressure, evolved us as unifying and integrating animals. The strong inference is that a unifying perspective is, as much as anything can be said to be, more likely to be true than a pluralistic one: if it were not more accurate, we would not have survived.

Despite its claims, "pluralism" is itself, paradoxically, a unifying perspective, but a rather procrustean one. What it does is reduce all cultural differences to a sort of grid of equal cultural black boxes laid out over an infinite plane, boxes whose external form is safely measurable but whose contents are incommensurable and thus unknowable, and which are, as it were, the fundamental monads or quanta of reality. Geometrically it resembles the characteristic griddesign of the American city, or the relationship between departments in an American multiversity. Though pluralism forbids any attempt to perceive one cultural box as containing another, and thus revealing a comparable and measurable internal structure, it is itself a sort of gigantic box containing all other boxes as its subordinate material. Thus, like relativism, it contains a subtle hegemonic ambition of its own.

One way of describing what is the problem with pluralism is to say that if the universe is curved, even a simple sphere, no grid of equal rectilinear blocks can cover (or "tile") it without overlap. Specialization, and the definition of smaller and smaller cultural units, might be seen as the desperate resource of an intellectual culture trying to resolve exactly this problem. If the squares are small enough, perhaps the distortions of the world's curvature will somehow go away. Pluralism is like a sort of oil, a liquid medium that merely holds its contents in suspension, and does not allow them to transform each other chemically.

Mere pluralism requires no change in one's own or one's neighbor's perspective; indeed, it is threatened by change, especially by any attempt to understand and imagine, and thus incorporate, the contents of another cultural box. It so fears hierarchyone possible result of such an incorporationthat it would prefer ignorance. Its tolerance of other worldviews could well be described as neglect or even as a kind of intellectual cowardice. At its worst one could describe it as an abdication or shirking of the great human enterprise of mutual knowledge, communication (literally, "making one together"), and mutual transformation.

The final stage in the intellectual passage into a new world is beginning to emerge, prompted by an instinctive discontent with the limits of mere pluralism. We might give it various names: syncretism, evolutionary epistemology, natural classicism, dramatistic ontology, the informational or Homeric/cybernetic economy.

Beneath all cultural differences certain fundamental human powers and capacities are emerging, that require cultural triggers to express themselves. These powers and capacities include language, the fundamental genres of the arts (musical tonality, the dramatic/performative ability, poetic meter, visual representation, dance, and so on), fundamental moral instincts, a religious/mystical ability, and the scientific rationality by which we learn to speak the other languages of nature. These powers and capacities are genetic endowments, created by evolution and embedded in our neural structure. Thus, true collaboration between cultures, and even a unifying syncretism of them, is possible on this shared biological basis. In this work ancient wisdom and traditional lore will join hands with the most sophisticated studies of genetics, paleoanthropology, cognitive science, cultural anthropology, ethology, sociobiology, the oral tradition, and performance theory. The word that describes our historical experience of the joining of old and new is Renaissance.

All cultures and all worldviews will be seen as competing or cooperating together in a single evolutionary drama, in a dynamic ecology of thought that is the continuation by swifter means of the universal process of evolution. The relationship between cultural worldviews will not be that between black boxes, but between characters in an ongoing drama, who can change each other, marry, and beget mutual offspring. It is not simply that this drama establishes the truth of things; it is the truth of things.

In other words, we can have faith that once the bonds that hold human ideas and cultures locked into a solid con figuration are loosed by the powerful solvents of our time, the elements of culture, being basically human, will have the hooks and valencies to permit them to build up new, coherent systems not limited to one ethnic tradition. Moreover, the new systems can be very flexible and need not purchase survival by a paranoid vigilance and rigidity. The conflict and miscegenation between and within such systems as they emerge is not a horrifying defilement or pollution, but the normal and healthy operation of an evolutionary ecology of ideas. Information will become the basis of a gift exchange economy, the inexhaustible currency of a new order of economics. The hard, the tragic, and the inflexible will not disappear, but will be valued aesthetically and treasured for its contribution to the richness of the world. Nor will it be turned into a tyrannical fetish and a standard of conformity. As the human race recognizes itself more and more as a "we," it will paradoxically be more and more surprised by the otherness of what was once considered familiar. How strange, how exotic, how attractive our own culture is! Is not this the strangest and most interesting of worlds?

Eventually, perhaps, that greatest of all Others, Nature itself, will be recognized also as part of the "we." This is a mystical idea: it is prefigured in the lyre of Orpheus, that could make animals, trees, and rocks listen with delight, or the ring of Solomon, which gave him understanding of the languages of birds and beasts; the magic flute, the staff of Prospero, the double-helix caduceus or metatron of Hermes and Moses. We will, having learned to command Nature, find that it is sweeter to converse with it, and bury the staff certain fathoms in the earth; and that we are Nature, and Nature is ourselves.

© Copyright Frederick Turner. Reprinted by permission. This essay appears in the collection Tempest, Flute, and Oz.