The anti-American obsession by Jean-Francois Revel

“Cultural diversity” has replaced “cultural exceptionalism” in the French-inspired, Eur- opean rhetoric. But in actuality, the two terms cover the same kind of cultural protectionism. The idea that a culture can preserve its originality by barricading itself against foreign influences is an old illusion that has always produced the opposite of the desired result. Isolation breeds sterility. It is the free circulation of cultural products and talents that allows each society to perpetuate and renew itself.

     The proof of this goes back to the old comparison between Athens and Sparta. It was Athens, the open city, that was the prolific fount of creation in letters and arts, philosophy and mathematics, political science, and history. Sparta, jealously guarding its “exceptionalism,” pulled off the tour de force of being the only Greek city not to have produced a single notable poet, ora- tor, thinker, or architect; their achievement was “diversity” of a sort, but at the price of emptiness. Parallel phenomena of cultural vacuity are found again in contemporary totalitarian states. Fear of ideological contamination induced the Nazis, the Soviets, and the Maoists to take refuge in an “official” art and a pompously dogmatic literature, sheer insults to the heritage of the peoples on whom they were inflicted.

When, in December 2001, Jean-Marie Messier said that “French-style cultural exceptionalism is dead,” he aroused horrified protests, but he was not going nearly far enough. He could have added: in fact, French cultural exceptionalism has never existed, thank goodness. If it had, it would be French culture itself that would be extinct. Let’s suppose that the sixteenth-century kings of France, instead of inviting Italian artists to their courts, had said to themselves: “This predominance of Italian painting is insufferable. We’ll keep those painters and their pictures out of the country.” The result of this castrating démarche would have been to thwart a renewal of French art. Again: between 1880 and 1914 there were many more French Impressionist paintings in American museums and the homes of private collectors than there were in France, despite which—or because of which—American art was subsequently able to find its own wellsprings, and then influence French art in turn.

      These cross-fertilizations are indifferent to political antagonisms. It was during the first half of the seventeenth century, when France and Spain were frequently at war, that the creative influence of Spanish literature on the French was particularly marked. The eighteenth century, which saw repeated conflict between France and England, was also the period when the most active and productive intellectual exchanges between the two countries occurred. And between 1870 and 1945, diplomatic relations between France and Germany were hardly idyllic, yet those were the years when German philosophers and historians had the most to teach the French. And wasn’t Nietzsche steeped in the ideas of the French moralists? It would be possible to extend indefinitely the list of examples illustrating this truth: cultural diversity arises from manifold exchanges. This applies just as well to gastronomy: only McDonald’s-hating lunatics are unaware of the obvious fact that there have never been so many restaurants offering foreign cuisines, in practically every country, as in our day. Far from imposing standardiza- tion, international exchange diversifies. Withdrawing behind a wall can only dry up inspiration.

      In practice, Europeans—and chiefly the French—use the jargon phrases “cultural exceptionalism” and “cultural diversity” as code words for state aid and quotas. We keep hearing that, after all, “Cultural goods are not simple commodities.” But that is merely a platitude. Whoever pretended that they were? Still, neither are they purely the products of state financing; otherwise, Soviet painting would have been the finest in the world.

     “Look at the Italian cinema industry,” people say. “Without government support, it has practically disappeared.” Yet in the years after the war, the brilliance of Italian film came not from subsidies, but from Rossellini and De Sica, Blasetti and Castellani, Visconti, and Fellini. Similarly, Spanish cinema owed its blossoming in the 1980s to the imagination of its creators and not to ministerial grants. And if the French film industry in 2001 has recaptured market leadership at home and found successes abroad, this is not because it is more subsidized than formerly, but because it has managed to produce a handful of films whose quality was appreciated not only by their auteurs, but by the public. A commercially successful French cinema, with international appeal, evidences a more authentic diversity than the kind preached by tedious diversity-mongers.

      This revival must be placed in perspective, however. As Dominique Moïsi dared to write, “The irony of this debate is increased by the fact that last year, the symbol of France’s successful resistance to Hollywood’s hegemony was a pleasant but very superficial comedy, Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amélie Poulain (“Amélie”), a string of trendy clips in advertising style without any social or intellectual content whatsoever. By comparison, Ken Loach’s penetrating films, which owe nothing to cultural exceptionalism, reflect a stimulating, refreshing cultural diversity.”[1]

       You don’t have to be an Aristotle or a Leibniz to grasp that “universal exceptionalism” is a contradiction in terms on the most elementary level of logic. And it is not the only such contradiction in a confused quarrel that has more to do with strong emotions than rational analysis. So Denis Olivennes, who heads Canal +, a television network that plays a big role in the French film industry’s financing, argues that a linchpin of this financial support is a tax on all new releases. In this way, he writes, “American films, which represent about half of new releases, contribute half of the funding.” Here is impressive sleight of hand. For it’s obvious that American films would not provide the funds, but rather the French filmgoer. More generally, the opposition between the state and the market in relation to the arts, between public moneys and the money of the public, is a misleading one. Public funds have but one source: the public, which is taxed by one means or another, directly or indirectly. The question is what proportion of the public’s contribution is freely offered and what proportion is milked from it by government fiat, then spent according to the whims of a minority of political and administrative decision-makers and commissions whose members are appointed, not elected.

A culture becomes decadent when it takes to running down other cultures while heaping praises on itself. Thus the professionals of radio and television keep harping on the notion—which they end up seeming to believe and making their audiences believe—that American television movies, produced with the sole aim of making a profit, avoid all controversial social and political issues. But French series, we are told over and over again, draw from a tradition of publicly funded state television; even productions from our privatized networks follow the aesthetic canons of this tradition. So they escape the “tyranny of profit” and can risk upsetting some of their viewers by courageously airing serious, painful controversies.

      But actually, the opposite is true. Michel Winkler has given ample proof of this in his book Les Miroirs de la vie, subtitled Histoire des séries américains. In an interview on Monde television, Winkler (who is a physician and a novelist, and author of the 1998 bestseller La Maladie de Sachs) said: “French television series are not designed to make you think. The three main networks have one and the same policy when it comes to TV drama: … catering to conformism. The viewers are treated like sheep.” Conversely, in the United States “television, with its social critiques, has taken over from the cinema of the years between 1930 and 1950.” Conventional French productions hold the public all the more captive in that only 15 percent of French people have access to cable or satellite television, compared with 80 percent in America.

      Bringing grist to the mill, let me cite the episodic television drama about the Watergate affair that was filmed and broadcast in the United States very soon after Richard Nixon’s resignation in the mid-seventies. The actor who played the president was virtually his double, and all the others were easily identifiable as real characters. And of course this was not the only national scandal that furnished the plot for an American TV production or movie, or a scenario close to actual events. But I’m still waiting for French equivalents: exposés, perhaps, of the insider trading that led to Pechiney’s buy- out of Triangle—insiders, it seems, at the highest levels of government—and of the Crédit Lyonnais and Elf scandals. If they were to be comparable to American productions, they would have to be accurate renditions of these episodes, highly unflattering to France, with a cast closely modeled on the original. It’s likely that we’ll have to wait a long time for these programs.

     Rehashing one of the stalest Marxist clichés, Catherine Tasca, the French minister of culture, confided to the Figaro magazine that “market laws are the totems of American power.” In fact, market laws are not so much totems as the explanation.

     In the cultural as in other domains, the quarrel with globalization that flared up during the 1990s actually represents a resistance to Americanization. Here again, in our perception of America’s influence as a threat and a disease, we should distinguish between what is fantastical and what is justified. And we should ask ourselves if American culture might include achievements and ways of doing things that others would do well to look at and emulate.

    The fear of seeing cultural identities drowned in a kind of planetary standardization, which today is thought to be overwhelmingly American in coloration but in former times showed other hues, has no basis in historical fact or impartial observation of today’s reality. The commingling of cultures, with predominance going first to one and then to another, has always led—in antiquity, in the medieval period, and in the modern world—not to uniformity, but to diversity. This is what is happening to- day, as the Swedish essayist Johan Norberg (among many others) has pointed out: “Many people are afraid that the world will become McDonaldized and homogenized: we will all end up wearing the same clothes, seeing the same films. But this is not a good description of the globalization process. Take a walk in Stockholm and look for yourself. Of course you’ll find burgers and Coca Cola, but you can also pick and choose from shish kebab, sushi, Tex-Mex, Peking duck, French cheeses, Thai soup.” And the author recalls what is frequently forgotten: that American culture is not just songs by Madonna and action films starring Arnold Schwarzenegger; it includes 1,700 symphony orchestras, opera attended by 7.5 million people every year, and museums that are visited by 500 million annually. Almost all American museums, where entrance is quite often free, owe their existence and funding to private sponsors.

     It is surprising that artists should have so little esteem for their art that they see its international dissemination as strictly dependent on the power of money and ad- vertising. Bertrand Tavernier, for example, whom I nevertheless knew to be a connoisseur of American cinema before he himself became a filmmaker, explained its success in these terms: “With the complicity of certain politicians and even newspapers … rely- ing on a bomb-proof distribution system, Americans impose their films on us.”[2] Yet Tavernier ought to know that a work of literature or art, still less a work of entertainment, can never be imposed on the public by force or cajoling. All the coercive power of the Soviet Union never succeeded, however much the commissars might have wanted to, in “imposing” official literature on readers, who preferred the clandestinely circulated, mimeographed material famously known as “samizdat” (literally, “self-published”). When the authors or distributors of this literature were caught by the police, they were charged with “cosmopolitanism”—another name for globalism—and sent to prison camps or special psychiatric hospitals.

     In January 2002, when Yves Saint Laurent unexpectedly announced his decision to retire, suddenly bringing his career as couturier to an end, reaction to the news was worldwide. And it was not only Saint Laurent’s talent that was influential everywhere, but also that of his predecessors, who for over a century had created and sustained French leadership in haute couture (which is not to diminish the excellence of other schools, notably the Italian). There was no suggestion in the foreign press that this traditional preeminence of French haute couture and Saint Laurent’s influence was attributable to a “bomb-proof distribution system” that, with the shady complicity of “politicians and newspapers,” had succeeded in “imposing” French styles on others. Anyone who said as much would have been ridiculed.

But the French make themselves liable to such ridicule when they assess the achievements of others. For instance, between 1948 and 1962, most of the of top prizes at the Venice Biennales were conferred on artists of the Paris school. But in 1964, when the first prize was awarded to Robert Rauschenberg, the newest leading light of a New York school that had been showing great vitality for twenty years, the French cried scandal, imperialism, and collusion with dealers.

Giancarlo Pajetta, an important Italian Communist leader, once said: “I have finally understood what pluralism is; it’s when lots of people share my point of view.” In that spirit, governments and elites almost everywhere have signed on to cultural globalism provided that their own countries are its source and model. In 1984, presenting a Projet culturel extérieur de la France, the French government said, with signal modesty, that this manifesto had “no parallel in other countries.” All cultures are of equal value, conceded the authors of this official document (a statement erring on the side of simplistic political correctness), but our culture is predestined to be a universal mediator, for it is “shared by people of every continent.” Touching optimism indeed, which naturally led up to the conclusion that “the future of the French language in the world can only be as a promoter of cultural progress and is closely linked to the future of people everywhere.” Global homogenization of culture, in the illusions of these authors, is fine—provided that it emanates from France.

     And the homogenization in question, which today is perceived most often as Americanization, is (insofar as it exists) American only in its most superficial and least durable aspects. It is above all the vehicle for popular culture—the entertainment, clothing styles, and fast foods favored by the young, and popular music (but not all of it, by any means). Here the word “culture” is being used in the rather loose sense that has prevailed because it is the entertainment industry that leads the choir in lamenting American influence. This influence may present a problem, but to identify the whole of cultural life with entertainment is a travesty.

     Contrary to what Jacques Chirac maintained, globalization is not a “cultural steamroller.” It is and always has been an engine of enrichment. Think, for example, how the French artistic sensibility was revitalized by the discovery—or rather fuller knowledge—of Japanese painting afforded at the end of the nineteenth century, or by the arrival in France of African art ten or twenty years later. There are plenty of similar cases. Unless one has been brainwashed by the brawlers of Seattle and Porto Alegre, the age-old lesson of the history of civilizations cannot be erased: barriers are what diminish and sterilize cultures; commingling is what fructifies and inspires them.

      Science is a different matter. Research depends much more on financial support than other pursuits. This fact partly explains the current American dominance, but only partly. It stems also from the way that American universities manage to combine teaching and research much more closely than their European counterparts, excepting German and British institutions. This is one of the reasons why American universities attract so many foreign students and professors. In its report for 2002, the French revenue court criticized—yet again—the CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique) for its sclerosis, aging researchers, and absence of peer review. This pessimistic diagnosis is a refrain that has been periodically repeated over the last few decades, but, as is common in France in every domain, it has never led to the slightest reform. Despite these drawbacks, some Nobel Prizes have gone to French scientists in recent decades, as well as to scientists of other countries, although the United States has of course won by far the largest number. So geographical diversity still prevails in the sciences, even though the notion of “diversity” in science itself is relatively meaningless: scientific knowledge, in contrast to understanding of sculpture or music, is no different in Tokyo, Rome, or Bombay than it is in Massachusetts or California.

The equal-opportunity nature of scientific knowledge means that internationalism is a necessary condition for its most rapid progress. If Descartes, through philosophical dogmatism, had not rejected Galileo’s physics, perhaps it might have fallen to a French scientist to make the discoveries that Newton eventually made in England, where speculation was much less constrained by metaphysical presuppositions than it was in France. And if Islam had not rejected modern science, perhaps Islamic countries would not have suffered from the “cultural exceptionalism” that has been theirs, and not always helpful, for the last three centuries.

For a culture to be strong and internationally prominent depends on the scope and quality of education at home and within its domain of influence, and how it adapts to evolving knowledge. The deterioration of elementary and secondary teaching in France since about 1970 is an acknowledged catastrophe, abundantly doc- umented and discussed. But there is less agreement about the deficiencies of French higher education. At a time when a grow- ing portion of the population has access to higher education, the quality of university instruction is crucial for the health of a culture and its appeal to outside observers.

Why do students, teachers, and researchers from every country in the world swarm to American schools and not to ours? In an important study, L’Université française du XIXe au XXIe siècle, Jean-Claude Casa- nova ruthlessly exposes how French higher education has failed in comparison with what is available in the United States. One reason is simply lack of money. The author notes that the endowment of Harvard, certainly not the largest university in America, is close to $20 billion—more than twice the annual expenditure of France on its entire university system. A second cause of our weakness, since the beginning of the nineteenth century, has been the promotion of administrative centralization. For a long time we have spoken of “the French university” rather than “French universities.” By the late nineteenth century, in his book Les Origines de la France contemporaine, Hippolyte Taine was convincingly describing the cultural sclerosis engendered by this academic authoritarianism.

To this lack of autonomy in our universities was added the mistake of separating teaching from research. For fifty years the harmful consequences have been regularly denounced by prominent French scientists, above all those who have had experience with German, English, and American universities. In this area as elsewhere, French reluctance to take account of the most incontrovertible studies and to make reforms (except in rhetorical fashion) has perpetuated this absurd divorce. Finally, a third weakness, according to Casanova, is that “the French university system was slow to extend education to the masses, by contrast with American universities, the first in the world to get serious about this task from the middle of the twentieth century onwards.”

True culture always transcends national frontiers. Among all the contradictions of anti-Americanism, one of the oddest is that one finds condemnation of cultural internationalism even when roles are reversed—that is, when it is American culture or popular culture that is subject to foreign influence. Thus, a Québecois journalist blathers against “the cultural fast food of the hour … The Phantom of the Opera, a cultural equivalent of the Big Mac.” As it happens, the show that Mme. Vaillancourt is talking about was originally not an American but a British production, and journalists should know that it was developed from the renowned French novel that came out in
1910, Le Fantôme de l’Opéra, which we owe to Gaston Leroux. We ought to be happy that a popular French book finds itself, by means of an American adaptation, also translated onto movie screens throughout the world. But in Mario Roy’s pertinent comment, “Facts have never been the point, of course.”

Hatred for America is sometimes pushed to the point where it transmutes into hatred for ourselves in France. This is what we saw when the Disneyland near Paris was opened in 1992. This event was denounced by our intellectuals as a “cultural Chernobyl.” But you will notice that a large part of Walt Disney’s themes, especially in his feature movies, are drawn from European sources. Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, Sleeping Beauty, Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio, the musical scores in Fantasia, the reconstruction of the pirate’s ship from Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island—all are borrowings from, and homages to, European creativity. And Disney pays deference to other traditional masterpieces from various cultures—for example, The Thousand and One Nights.

That these popular stories, the fruit of the imagination of so many different peoples over so many centuries, orally transmitted from generation to generation, then fixed in written form by authors who collected them, should finally appear in a completely new medium thanks to the unique talent of a Californian artist—isn’t this an example of the unforeseeable paths and crossroads of cultures? Their dynamic motifs travel by varied transmission routes, ancient and modern, scornful of the prudish chauvinism of the narrow-minded protectionists.[3]

These last will surely raise the objection that exploitation of these ancient Western and oriental legends by American show business can only betray their special qual- ities by deforming and commercializing them. Hollywood, as everyone knows, or ought to know, has never been anything but the capital of bad taste, vulgarity, and banality. American show business destroys other cultures more than it honors them. But at this point, we have left the sphere of reason to enclose ourselves in our own self-contradictory fantasies.

Shame at seeing the variety of cultures allegedly being effaced for the profit of America alone is reinforced by another factor, this one very real: the international spread of the English language. English is the mother tongue of approximately 380 million human beings. Almost an equal number use it as a second language, not counting the legions who know a few words and phrases, an indispensable minimum of the lingua franca for travel abroad, even in non-Anglophone countries. If this internationalization of English is largely the consequence of American superpower, does that mean it must lead to the cultural Americanization of the planet? Not at all. Obviously, to learn elementary English, enough for everyday needs—for commercial exchanges, financial transactions, even political and diplomatic business—doesn’t require even a superficial familiarity with Anglo-American culture and thought, much less the abandonment of one’s own culture. The utilitarian use of English by hundreds of millions of our contemporaries is clearly not incompatible with an abysmal ignorance of the great writers and thinkers as well as the historical, political, and religious events that have forged the British and American civilizations. Conversely, someone who knows scarcely a word of the Russian language can be imbued with the Russian sensibility thanks to assiduous reading of Russian classics in the often fine translations that have been made in so many languages.

And then, globalization is equally a factor in the learning of foreign languages other than English. As Mario Vargas Llosa writes, “How many millions of young people of both sexes, throughout the world, have undertaken, thanks to globalization, to learn Japanese, German, Mandarin and Cantonese Chinese, Arabic, Russian or French? Undoubtedly the number is very large, and this is a sign of our times; the trend, fortunately, will continue to grow in years to come.” So let’s not forget: globalization is really the facilitation of travel, both mentally and physically. The furthest destinations, once accessible only to the wealthy, are now within reach of a vast crowd of cosmopolitans, for a relatively modest sum.

One may justifiably object that the omnipresence of English could lead to the adulteration of other languages, not so much by borrowings that they make from English—this is a normal and universal linguistic phenomenon—as by the distortions in syntax and vocabulary that Anglicisms may impose. In France, Étiemble listed, from 1964, an inventory of such contaminations of the French language in its famous Parlez-vous franglais? If abusive or superfluous “Americanisms” do have a tendency to invade other languages, it should nevertheless be stressed that the decay of some “high culture” languages has mostly autonomous causes. There are two principal ones: the decline in educational levels in nations where they were previously high, and a spurious modernism that regards any concern to protect and develop the specific virtues of a language as backward-looking academic purism. The majority of semantic confusions, improprieties, and syntactical inconsistencies that pepper, for example, the French media language are of purely domestic origin. They owe nothing to contamination by English. Yet, it is true that the impoverishment of a language makes it more and more vulnerable to invasion by alien terms and structures—as happens today, in the majority of cases, from a bastardized English. Of course, every language must evolve, but it’s a mistake to forget that the evolution can be to good or ill effect. The bombing of a cathedral is certainly one form of architectural innovation, but does that make it desirable?

It remains a fact that in the domain of languages too, globalization leads to variety, not uniformity. The spread of English facilitates communication and mutual influence between cultures; it is hardly a trivial matter when, thanks to the lingua franca, Japan- ese, Germans, Filipinos, Italians, Russians, French, Brazilians, etc., can participate in the same colloquium, sharing information and ideas. Meanwhile, many more people than in the past speak or understand, in addition to their native language, one or two foreign languages other than English.

The real danger—conceivably a mortal one—for European culture is that anti-American and antiglobalist phobias might derail progress. Guy Sorman has shown the scientific and technological retreats this obscurantism has led to in his book Le Progrès et ses ennemis. And this isn’t some “right-wing” or “left-wing” thesis; it is a rational one. It is defended alike by the liberal-democrat Sorman and by the socialist Claude Allègre. The latter wages war against the idea that Europe should abandon nuclear energy, genetic engineering and research using embryonic cells. Should the pressure groups that agitate against progress win the day, in twenty years the European states will regress, he writes, “to the level of the underdeveloped countries, in a world that will be dominated by the United States and China” (L’Express, February 7, 2002.) The anti-American fanatics will then have succeeded in making Europe even more dependant on the United States than it is today.

Notes

This essay is adapted from the book Anti-Americanism, a translation of Jean-Francois Revel’s L’obsession anti-americaine: Son fonctionnement, ses causes, ses inconsequences published in September by Encounter Books (www. encounterbooks. com). Go back to the text. “Les Deux Frances,” Les Echos, January 14, 2002. It’s worth pointing out, however, that the French film industry’s two big hits in 2001–2002, Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amélie Poulain and Astérix et Obélix: Mission Cléopâtre, were shot in German and English studios. The reason for this is that the French government robs successful producers in order to subsidize hacks. Go back to the text. Must one suppose, then, that our own French distribution system is susceptible to bombing? Go back to the text. I develop this theme at greater length in an article that first appeared in Le Point in March 21, 1992 and was then reprinted in my collection Fin du siècle des ombres. Go back to the text.



From The New Criterion
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