Across the Pond
Thoughts on America from the French thinker, Jean Baudrillard, in America (first published in French in 1986):
-”And that smile everyone gives you as they pass, that friendly contraction of the jaws triggered by human warmth…they certainly do smile at you here, though neither from courtesy, nor from an effort to charm. This smile signifies only the need to smile. It is a bit like the Cheshire Cat’s grin: it continues to float on faces long after all emotion has disappeared…but it keeps you at a distance…The smile of immunity, the smile of advertising…” (p 34, America)
-”The confrontation between America and Europe reveals not so much a ‘rapprochement’ as a distortion, an unbridgeable rift. There isn’t just a gap between us, but a whole chasm of modernity. You are born modern, you do not become so. And we have never become so. What strikes you immediately in Paris is that you are in the nineteenth century. Coming from Los Angeles, you land back in the 1800s. Every country bears a sort of historical predestination, which almost definitively determines its characterisitcs” (p 73, America)
-”Yes, California (and America with it) is the mirror of our decadence, but it is not decadent at all. It is hyperreal in its vitality, it has all the energy of the simulacrum. ‘It is the world centre of the inauthentic.’ Certainly it is: that is what gives it its orginality and power.
…
What is new in America is the clash of the first level (primitive and wild) and the ‘third kind’ (the absolute simulacrum). There is no second level. This is a situation we find hard to grasp, since this is the one we have always privileged: the self-reflexive, self-mirroring level, the level of unhappy consciousness. But no vision of America makes sense without this reversal of our values: it is Disneyland that is authentic here! The cinema and TV are America’s reality! The freeways, the Safeways, the skylines, speed, the deserts - these are America, not the galleries, churches, and culture…” (p 104, America)
What do you think about these observations? What are your thoughts on America?
September 22nd, 2004 at 4:09 am
I am pondering your question and will get back to you. Interesting to view a French perspective on America, when our nation so often comes from our own perspective and world view and does not always take into account the culture of other nations, or judges itself as superior.
September 22nd, 2004 at 10:01 pm
I believe I read this in an article on John Kerry and how the Northeast of the US is distinctly different from the rest of America. How it is more old Europe than the West because, for the most part, old-money settled there first with all the rank and privilege they had in Europe. And since they held the positions of power and influence, they had no desire/need to venture out.
The poor, on the other hand, had nothing to lose and so they became our frontiersmen and explorers as American flowed westward. So the western mindset still harbors much of that “evolutionary” change, that one can succeed through singular work effort and ingenuity and that ascendancy is not constrained to those of ‘noble’ birth.
In my limited travels to the UK and Europe, I have noted cultures that in part hang their worth or importance on the scientific, religious, or military achievements of the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries. Renaissance art or architecture or grand cathedrals built for the glory of God and yet now empty except for the hordes of Americans who fill the coffers with admission fees. They seem to proclaim “see how great are our accomplishments” and those become the basis for their art and culture.
And those edifices and canvasses are spectacular and worthy of appreciation. But what have they done lately, say within the last 150 years? I hope I don’t sound xenophobic but the only wars they have won have been with the help of Americans. Their empire and influence has shrunk to their own borders. And most of the most important inventions/advancements in the last 100 years have been grounded in American inventiveness or industry - the mass production of the automobile, the airplane, radio, television, moving pictures, personal computers and the internet to name a few.
These have come with their own set of problems like air pollution, the coarsening of daily life, and the intrusion of electronics into every aspect of our lives, but the standard of living for most within the first-world has been transformed.
So when I walk down the street in America and see smiling faces, I see the enthusiasm of possibility rather that the sullen face of limited choices or low expectations. I see the face that welcomes races and ethnicities from throughout the world to a place of opportunity. And perhaps I see faces that smile with the awareness that these rights are premised as God-given rather than the result of laws of men.
September 23rd, 2004 at 12:14 am
Tor, thanks for you thoughts. There is a great deal of truth in what you say about the cathedrals, etc. of Europe (which is why I don’t really like going into them–great things may have taken place in them, but they are dens of heresy today). It’s also true that the vast majority of the ‘progress’ in the world in the last 150 years has come from the U.S. Yet I think we need to be very careful in stating these observations. I would not be at all surprised to see the U.S. go the same way in the not so distant future (actually, I’d be more surprised if it didn’t happen).
I would, however, strongly contest your last statement. These ‘rights’ (I’m not sure they are properly called ‘rights’) are surely given by God, but very few recognize them as such. Check out Romans 1:18-23.
Anyway, good thanks for sharing your thought-provoking thoughts
September 23rd, 2004 at 6:07 pm
Bryce, I agree that we are probably on the same slippery slope to unadulterated humanism (and the slope may be fairly steep from my observations) and fewer hold God as the source of their ‘rights’ (or whatever) as in centuries past. However, I choose to believe (or hope) that those I meet share (or will come to share) in God’s grace.
September 25th, 2004 at 11:16 am
So, let me get this straight…you acknowledge that the Bible teaches that the majority of people do not recognize God as the source of common grace, but choose to believe that they do (or will do) so anyway?