Posted on 08/12/2005 4:47:29 PM PDT by naturalman1975
CULTURAL studies, that most maligned area of the contemporary humanities, may finally be about to have its moment in the sun, if it is prepared to take it. Some of the most urgent questions confronting us in the age of terror seem to me custom-made for a discipline that, on its own account, is about the promulgation of social values and - most important, in the age of home-grown Islamist terror - the formation of subcultures that to a greater or lesser extent choose to separate from the parent culture.
It would not be unprecedented if cultural studies were suddenly to leap to the forefront of relevant academic research. One of the dangers of requiring universities to address the needs of the job market and the broader economy in their teaching and research is a subset of the whole problem of picking winners: you never know. You never know what shift in the supply and demand curves is going to create a glut of geologists, just as you are about to graduate the 1000 extra geologists you enrolled four years ago when rock-crunchers were in short supply.
After 9/11, one of the most pressing questions forced on us was how young men who had lived and trained in the West, had known its tolerance and tasted its pleasures, could commit lunatic acts of terror designed to replace Western democracy with medieval theocracy. Following the sickening attacks in London on July 7, this question was honed to an even finer point: How could young men entirely raised and educated in a wonderful country such as Britain turn against its values so utterly as to be led to commit acts of terror against their innocent countrymen?
In suggesting cultural and subcultural studies could be brought to bear on these questions, I'm not arguing that what we need to do in order to counter the terror threat is apply more sensitive understandings to it. What we need to do is, in the immortal phrase of Joseph Conrad's Mr Kurtz, "exterminate the brutes"; exterminate them before they create another 100 motherless or fatherless children in Madrid or London or Melbourne.
But to do that we need better to understand how they think and what forces mould them into such diehard enemies of the broader culture that nurtures and protects them. In some (but by no means all) ways, the young adult males who comprise these cells conform to cultural studies' description of a subculture. Subcultures are often defined by their opposition to the values of the larger culture to which they belong. And while nobody is accusing mods or rockers, punks or hippies of attempting a violent overthrow of the West, that is no reason why the subcultural template cannot be used better to get inside the heads of the Islamo-fascists.
Several aspects of the template seem a good fit. According to Dick Hebdige in his seminal Subculture: The Meaning of Style, subcultures often attract working-class boys who do badly at school and need to find alternative sources of self-esteem. Does this not sound a lot like the story of Richard Reid, the so-called shoe bomber, or our own Aussie Taliban, David Hicks? In addition, subcultures do not have a manifesto but cohere around style: well, the home-grown Islamists may not have a discernible style but they certainly don't have a coherent manifesto.
More important, cultural studies sees subculture as involving complex generational negotiations involving the parent culture - modern Britain or Australia, say - and the culture of the parents. Teddy boys with their drape coats and punks with their ripped T-shirts seem to be reaching nostalgically towards a version of their parents' working-class culture that has ceased to exist.
I was educated at one of our leading multicultural meritocracies, Melbourne High School, and I saw a version of this in the way that some of my friends who were Orthodox - Jewish, Eastern or Greek - responded to the conflict between what their parents believed was acceptable and what the materialist, free-wheeling culture of modern Australia held out as possible. In a small number of cases, the second generation reacted by swinging wildly towards a much more radical separation from liberal-secular social values than their semi-assimilated parents.
A popular treatment of the phenomenon is Cat Stevens's catchy song Father and Son. Thirty years ago we assumed that the son was breaking away from the father in search of something on the far side of the mainstream culture: that is, a version of the sexually liberated counter-culture. The subsequent trajectory of Yusuf Islam tells us that what the speaker has discovered is a subculture on the far side of his father: ultra-orthodoxy.
In order to catch those strangers-in-the-hearth, the Western Islamists of the 21st century, we may need to catch hold of the fact that, rather than a clash of civilisations, we're dealing with a clash of cultures, all of which are Western phenomena: the anything-goes, secular parent culture; the assimilated Islam practised by Pakistani, North African or Middle Eastern Muslims who have spent decades "making it" in the West; and a younger generation that cannot make this model work any more and thus becomes vulnerable to brainwashing by the man from al-Qa'ida or Jemaah Islamiah.
Cultural studies researchers are well placed to make a contribution to understanding this theme and materially advancing our strategic interests, but there are no prizes for guessing why most of them don't. It is because they too are immersed in a subculture: the blaming ourselves tendency that continues to insist the real culprit in the terror wars is the parent culture, liberal capitalism. This pose was always mostly style rather than substance, and every bomb that goes off renders it less seemly. Cultural studies is one more area where our intellectuals have an opportunity to wake up and get with the program.
Who is this guy? Interesting article.
Just another attempt to glorify these murdering scum!
The question is, what good is cultural studies anyway if it can't point out a fascist, totalitarian, head-chopping culture as something that should be addressed, before it hits the front pages?
He thinks the left has got it seriously wrong on terrorism.
He's co-editor of a book - Blaming Ourselves: September 11 and the Agony of the Left
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.