American ‘Culture,’ Cooked by the Melting Pot. In the strict (anthropological) sense of the word, culture no longer exists; we live in a post-cultural world, says Christopher Clausen, whose book Faded Mosaic is reviewed here by Jonathan Yardley. And the distinction is not merely a semantic one [Washington Post]:

“The truth is that “the connection with an ancestral culture is now so vestigial that whether to assert or deny it has become entirely a matter of choice.” The greatest influences on us are not ethnic or religious or racial (though this last, for African Americans, remains a powerful and unavoidable consideration) but “the expanding reach of a homogenizing federal government, universal access to the same products and television programs, interstate highways and a restlessly mobile population.” Today, Clausen argues, “what most ordinary people who call for multiculturalism want is something more like post-culturalism: no conflict based on cultural factors, none of the sharp edges that cause bleeding.” The idea of the melting pot may no longer be fashionable, but a melting pot is where we live.

Instead of a crazy quilt of conflicting cultures with specific rules, demands and expectations, we inhabit a mass society that claims to value individuals and that places “extreme emphasis on personal feelings and self-gratification” yet is in fact a society of “mass individualism, an individualism without much individuality.” We are “oriented to pleasure–the desires of the self, not its duties,” yet because we all worship at the same altars–most notably, or notoriously, mass entertainment and the cult of personality, or celebrity–the result is “a mass individualism that encourages people to assert themselves in nearly identical ways.”