I broke away from the group to have dinner with a friend last night at a North Korean restaurant in Beijing. The North Korean Women's Ping Pong Team was there, looking much better-fed than most of their compatriots, so it's no surprise that our dinner conversation drifted to ping-pong diplomacy, the recent New York Philharmonic concert in Pyongyang, and the concept of cultural diplomacy in general. The gist of the conversation was this: while it's certainly true that instances of New York Philharmonic-style cultural diplomacy exist in China, they are being drowned out by the din of capitalism, with globalization frequently leading not to mutual understanding but to wholesale adoption, at least by some, of many of the worst elements of 21st century Western culture.
Without meaning to be too judgmental, I'm sure we can all agree that the consumer products and pop culture of the West -- while not evil in themselves -- are not the best our civilization has to offer to China. Unfortunately, though, Western cultural diplomacy in China frequently translates into a growing fondness for Big Macs and Mocha Frappuccinos, an obsession with designer labels like Louis Vuitton and Prada and an intense desire to drive a Mercedes or a BMW. In China, images of the United States come not from the New York Philharmonic but from MTV, Hollywood films and bootleg copies of Sex and the City and Desperate Housewives (most of my young Chinese friends own multiple complete seasons of both). Add to this the fact that some of the Americans who come to China most frequently are less than stellar representatives of our culture (it's no accident that some of the most illicit forms of capitalism, such as prostitution, are centered around the Western business hotels in cities like Shanghai and Beijing) and it seems clear that China is experiencing Western culture through a hyper-capitalist filter that de-emphasizes some of the best things we have to offer in favor of a sexier and more profitable pop culture consumerism.
Globalization and cultural blending have long been proclaimed by many (including me) to be the keys to a more vibrant and inclusive global community characterized by mutual understanding and a world culture that synthesizes the best of each country into a whole that is far more than the sum of its parts. My travels in the last five years or so, though, have made me increasingly aware of the dangers inherent in this process, leading me to worry about the potential for globalization and cultural blending to reduce world civilization to the least common denominator. If we are to make this work -- and I don't think we have any choice at this point -- I believe that we need to swim against the current of consumerism and pop culture in order to ensure that this doesn't happen.
We educators have been talking for a long time about the need for schools, and especially independent schools, to serve as counter-cultural influences resisting this tendency to sink to the lowest cultural common denominator, and it seems clear to me as a new Peddie teacher that Peddie is exerting itself heroically in this endeavor. Given everything I have experienced in Asia in the past few years, though, I wonder whether it's time for us to globalize this effort, and perhaps to take increased responsibility for counteracting the negative influences of our own country's cultural exports. Our politicians speak indignantly about the Chinese sending "tainted" products to the U.S., accusing the Chinese of being so focused on profits that they are neglecting quality control, but the Chinese have been having this same problem with the West, on a cultural level, since the British started selling them opium in the nineteenth century. Perhaps it's time that we in the West take a good hard look at our own exports, especially in the cultural sphere, and reflect upon the various ways that a product can be "tainted".
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