Smooth blending?

Kwame Anthony Appiah's cover piece in the Times magazine this last weekend: "A Case for Contamination", brings a fresh and welcome voice to the public discourse of cultural identity. Not that Appiah hasn't been around for a long time and highly respected too, both as Anthony and, upon subsequent consideration, as Kwame Anthony. I can't even say if he's changed his tune much, as I haven't read more than book reviews from his earlier work, though I always assumed that his book In my Father's House was in the cultural authenticity camp.

Not no mo. Appiah has come out swinging for a more or less modern/post-modern ethic and aesthetic of blending, largely of market determinism. Mostly, the gemeinschafft vision of a privileged and authentic agrarian way of life has been cut down. The problem, Appiah points out, is that nobody wants to be authentically cold, dirty, and disease-ridden. If this spells the death of cultural forms, so be it, people live better. Dallas and Baywatch hurt nobody, cuz the viewers have minds of their own.

But then, a couple of days later, reading the Economist on the fate of Finno-Ugric languages and the people who speak them, you've got to wonder: are there intrinsic benefits to keeping rare languages and cultures alive, as there are in the biosphere? Is there a cultural pharmaceutical industry which muddles through looking for rare ingredients? History shows that monocultures grow and are strengthened through encounters with resistance. Is not cultural authenticity such a pushing back?

In any case, it's good to see someone on the left veer back towards Enlightenment transparency, away from the neo-Herderian claptrap of the purveyors of pious particularity.