Heritage: worth the fight?

When I read about the ever-increasingly depressing news from the Middle East, I often get… When I read about the ever-increasingly depressing news from the Middle East, I often get especially jaded with the ever-popular ideals of nationhood and cultural heritage — the issues forever at stake in that war-ravaged region. The Arabs have their Islamic ideals to uphold, the Israelis have their Zionist dream and now America has stuck its foot in with our delusional democratizing crusade.

Truth be told, a lot of ideals are at stake, but I always find it a great puzzler and a shame that the governments in these conflicts don’t seem to consider the human costs they’ve been paying for their ideals of faith and heritage.

The term heritage itself often commands some degree of reverence — or at least some lip service — in political public arenas. The very word heritage is used whenever someone means to shed a positive light on a culture; to be popularly associated with heritage is to have won mainstream acceptance.

Jazz music, for example, is now widely regarded as integral to America’s musical history and in particular to African-American heritage, but in the early days of the 20th century, jazz was labeled as a scourge by authority figures. Rock ‘n’ roll and hip-hop, to a lesser extent, have also undergone similar maturation processes from being seen as threats to society to becoming culturally significant in the eyes of the establishment.

Not surprisingly, right now it is classic rock and hip-hop that score the most heritage points, since their original fanbases are becoming old enough to have the wealth and power to legitimize those musical eras.

On a much wider time scale, religion evolves similarly in that a given religion’s mythical status grows and grows the more antiquated and cloudy its history becomes. Many successful religions seem to have gone through much persecution and/or ridicule before they made it big. Even today, most people will look upon fledgling cults with more skepticism than they would for ancient religions. In part, this is because antiquity has historically always inspired some amount of respect from people.

The ancient Romans, for example, initially allowed the Jews to continue to practice Judaism out of sheer reverence for a tradition that was older than they were. There is also simply the matter of strength in numbers that determines the success of a would-be major religion, because having lots of adherents translates into lots of force and/or votes. Like Tom Wolfe once said, a cult is a religion with no political power. The bigger a new cult becomes, the more respect it can demand and the closer it will be to full religion status.

With all this relativity concerning the nature of heritage in hindsight, can we really draw a line defining what counts as culturally valuable or not? And how can we decide whether a culture’s heritage claim is legitimate enough to excuse some action that wouldn’t be considered acceptable otherwise?

Regardless of the ethics involved, though, in reality the line is often drawn based on just how virulently people can cling to an ideology. A prime recent example is the insane international fracas that exploded earlier this year over the twelve infamous cartoons published by a Danish newspaper that made jabs at Islam and depicted images of Prophet Muhammad. The extreme reactions of some radical Muslims to those cartoons, which included razing Scandinavian embassies, certainly wouldn’t be tolerated within Western society itself. When confronted with the raw fury of the Islamic community, the West backed down because it wasn’t worth it to confront such righteous anger.

I sometimes think the whole notion of “national heritage” comes across as a modern-day sublimation of heritage’s darker cousins, nationalism and ethnocentrism. Heritage is ethnocentrism-lite, in a sense. The spirit of heritage is generally not jingoistic enough to trumpet one culture’s values above others in an overbearing manner. Most of the time it’s more like rooting for one’s favorite sports team (as with the World Cup) or favorite brand of music. And in moderate doses, it’s generally harmless, as long as it doesn’t brew into nationalism.

I think that the importance of cultural heritage to a given people is often inversely related to that people’s perception of how dominant or threatened their culture is; maybe we can call that “culture security.” Despite significant numbers of flag-hugging Americans, there are also many Americans who are disillusioned with the mainstream culture and choose to identify with other places as different as Japan or Jamaica, if not with some subculture that’s just devoid of a specific nationality. Or think of how people with traces of Native American ancestry will generally say so with a bit of pride, even when it’s just one-sixteenth of their bloodline. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but it shows how much people can want to identify with a culture that feels more distinct than the one they’re familiar with.

Cultures that perceive themselves as being threatened, or have had a history of being threatened, on the other hand, are often the most willfully conscious and defensive of their sense of heritage. And that of course is essentially what’s been troubling the Middle East for the past century — a series of raging cultural clashes between the Islamic world, the West and Zionism, all three of which are now very fearful of threats real and imagined. Lord knows, anyone who has paid attention to the Middle East conflicts can see that these ideologies mean a lot to the people there. And heritage can be a fine idea in its own way.

It’s like hot cocoa for the ego, with its warm and cozy feelings of effortless communal identity. But is it really worth all this trouble?

E-mail Konrad at klk27@pitt.edu.