This week’s Archdruid Report is actually really good. “Culture Death” starts off with an invaluable summation of the mythological nature of “the Nation,” and how that myth took root and flourished with the rise of fossil fuels, though the lack of emphasis on the printing press, and standardized language as just one of several factors rather than the clearly dominant factor are differences of emphasis between Greer’s summary and most of the leading scholarship. Thus, as with most things, deindustrialization promises the reverse process: the end of “the Nation” as the locus of group identity. Greer still ignores bioregionalism as the force drawing the new fault lines for the end of the “Nation” myth, but his analysis of the problem is solid enough. It’s the solution where things start to get a bit wonky.

Palomar College’s Anthropology Page is a great resource; one of the few places online where you can find clear, concise, basic anthropological information, like an Anthropology 101 course for the internet. Their glossary provides a perfectly workable definition of “culture death”: “the complete disappearance of a culture as a result of the total acculturation or the death of all of the people who shared it.”

According to Greer, the triumph of the market in the last half of the twentieth century has resulted in an American “culture death.”

The second half of the 20th century, in fact, saw the death of anything that could reasonably be called American culture. Most examples of what anthropologists call “culture death�? have seen people beaten and starved into relinquishing their traditional cultures; what the modern American experience shows is that people can also be bribed by prosperity and cajoled by advertising into doing the same thing. Granted, in a society awash in cheap abundant energy, it’s easier and cheaper to buy one’s culture ready-made from a store than to make the investments of time and energy into family and community needed to maintain a living culture in the true meaning of the word. Equally, in a society where “fashion�? driven by media campaigns takes the place of any less mercenary guiding force, making traditional American cultures look as bad as possible was just another bit of marketing. Think of the movie Deliverance, with its likeably cosmopolitan heroes struggling to survive against the brutal malevolence of backwoods villains, and the banjo riff that provided the movie’s leitmotif defining traditional American culture itself as a hostile Other: that same message has flooded the American media for much of a century.

Right in that very analysis is the seed of where Greer’s gone wrong. The “commercial culture” of the First World in general, and the United States in particular, has had an incredibly powerful effect on us. The first part of Adam Curtis’ four-part documentary, Century of the Self (Google video) explores the origins of this phenomenon, particularly in the person of Edward Bernays, perhaps best known for coining the term “public relations,” because, by his own admission, “propaganda” had a negative connotation. Bernays was an American, but he was the nephew of Sigmund Freud, and Bernays was almost single-handedly responsible for the popularization of Freud’s ideas, even though both his own contemporaries and most psychologists today consider most of Freud’s work to be mostly baseless. As Curtis illustrates, Bernays based his work on Freud’s theories, dedicated to creating marketing that could create a new culture, to turn a dangerous citizenry that might oppose growing government power into a docile crowd of consumers. Bernays introduced to us notions so widespread few of us even consider them commercial anymore: bacon and eggs for breakfast, and smoking as “cool.” Contemporary magazines dubbed him the “Young Machiavelli of Our Time.” In his book Propaganda (1928), Bernays wrote:

The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. …We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. …In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons…who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.

In an age of abundant, cheap energy, Bernays almost single-handedly created the “commercial culture” Greer describes. He did so by appealing to basic, deep-seated needs—needs like freedom, equality and community—andpowerfully insinuating that the consumption of such-and-such a product would provide for those needs. Of course, they don’t, and that’s half the point. Previously, advertising had largely relied on the practical needs a product fulfilled: how well this ironing board worked, for instance. Bernays recognized that this limited sales. If a product’s usefulness lay in the things it could actually do, then you would only ever need one, and its purpose would be fulfilled. But if a product could be translated to some deep, abiding emotional need that civilization simply did not fulfill—needs like freedom, or equality, or community—then you could convince consumers to buy endlessly, tossing them into a bottomless pit of social emptiness and hollowness that could never be filled, because the promise was fundamentally a lie. The product would never fulfill your basic social needs, but so long as you believed it could, you would keep consuming, even though it never seemed to work.

But as Greer himself noted, lurking out there like some monstrous Other, there is still a genuine culture. The victory of Bernays and company is dramatic, but not total. There are distinctly local cultures still in the United States; it’s these cultures we’ve been examining in our bioregionalism series. They are still there. The United States hasn’t suffered culture death. The local cultures are still there; smothered, perhaps, but there.

This is a particularly urban attitude, as well. In more rural areas, local cultures are doing even better. That’s the very mismatch that Greer himself passingly notices, but fails to take fully into consideration. The great city vs. country dichotomy owes in no small part to this very phenomenon: that the “commercial culture” is so much stronger in the cities, than in the country.

With the removal of cheap, abundant energy, Bernays’ system will cease to function at all, and the lie will be exposed for what it is. Humanity will no longer have the choice of trying to fill its deep social needs with material goods; it will be forced to confront those failings head on in order to survive. If the twentieth century was the “Century of the Self,” then the twenty-first will, of necessity, be the “Century of the Tribe.” Deindustrialization will not leave any other option open to us.