End Cultural Isolationism

The terrorist attacks of September 11 and ensuing events have brought home to us the fact that the U.S. is hated by many in the world. A lot of this hatred is based on an ignorance that allows the hater to perceive the United States only in monolithic terms, as a heartless materialist and imperialist state. In the longer term, our war with terrorism will be an ideological contest — if this were not the case, the terrorists would already have surrendered in the face of our overwhelming military superiority. To fight this war, the United States will have to look closely at the causes of the misperception of our country by many in the world.

It is my contention that U.S. arts policy, beginning with the Reagan administration, has played a surprising role helping to create this misperception. For the past two decades, beginning just as the Cold War ended, cultural isolation has been at the core of this policy. During the Cold War, the government understood the importance of cultural participation and exchange when it came to opening people’s hearts and minds. After all, communicating with the public is what artists everywhere do.

The Reagan administration’s withdrawal from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in 1987 signaled to the international community that the U.S. no longer considered itself just one among many of the world’s cultures. Similarly, the administration’s national policy of focusing attention primarily on a few select western European traditions led to decreased funding for artistic and cultural diversity here at home. In both cases, the Reagan administration took aim at the not-for-profit arts sector, which is why, for example, the national endowments for the arts and humanities were relentlessly attacked. (Ironically, those attacks were led by our own homegrown religious fundamentalists.)

The distinction between the not-for-profit and commercial arts sectors is important because, devoid of its competition, the impact of U.S. commercial culture has become overwhelming. Given the nature of our 20-year policy, we should not be surprised that much of the world’s view of America is confined to what is conveyed to them by Hollywood movies, commercial television and popular music — a mix of images, stories and themes that would give anyone reason to question our societal values.

It sounds like a joke, but when the Appalachian theater company that I direct performed in Sweden, audiences came expecting to see Jed and Ellie May Clampett from the "Beverly Hillbillies" in the rape scene from the movie "Deliverance," all set in the Texas of J. R. Ewing’s "Dallas." In fact, with one exception, our theater’s European tours to Sweden, Denmark, England, Wales and the Czech Republic have been received by audiences who had trouble believing that something like the real Appalachian story exists in America.

The one exception was the theater’s tour of Welsh coal-mining valleys. That 1989 tour was cosponsored by the British Labour Party at the height of Thatcherism, and the Welsh working people had no trouble empathizing with our drama: Their mines were either being closed or privatized, and if privatized, the new owners were likely to be the same absentee corporations that owned our central Appalachian coalfields. As in Appalachia, dissenting oral narratives arising from suppressed histories are part of the Welsh culture — as they are for many cultures in the world.

If it is fair to generalize from our theater’s experience that there is now very limited European understanding of the complexity of U.S. social reality, then one can appreciate what must be the almost total lack of comprehension of this reality in those countries and regions of the world even less connected to western culture. And our international problem is compounded by the not-for-profit arts sector’s increasing isolation here at home. The fact that the U.S. not-for-profit professional theater presently draws 80 percent of its audience from the top 15 percent of the U.S. population measured by income is emblematic of this isolation. It follows that in the rare instances when international exchange now occurs, it is usually between elites.

The bottom line: People outside the U.S. have little or no chance to witness the cultural — and spiritual — diversity that energizes and propels the United States. And we at home now struggle to celebrate this diversity in the face of reduced support for the not-for-profit arts and a pervasive commercial monoculture. Too often now, the not-for-profit arts sector faces the choice of accepting its marginal status or collaborating with the commercial sector — each collaboration blurring a little bit more of the line that demarcates the two sectors’ often contradictory values.

It is now clearly in our national interest for the Bush administration to end cultural isolationism and replace it with a policy that secures the role of the not-for-profit arts in international exchange — and links that exchange to a domestic arts policy that values our own national diversity. In this way, there will be the framework for the arts at home and abroad to develop common goals. These goals should include greater access in order to broaden public participation, telling the stories the commercial cultural industries don’t tell, and supporting the efforts of communities to solve their problems in a just and democratic way.

The arts have a unique capacity to do all of these things and much more in a manner that builds bridges of empathy and understanding across the boundaries and borders that divide people and nations. What’s required is a cultural policy that is anti-isolationist, both at home and abroad, a policy that embraces the give and take of the search by artists and audiences everywhere for meaning, relevance and beauty.

Dudley Cocke is the director of Roadside Theater, the Appalachian theater company that is a part of the Appalshop in Whitesburg, Kentucky.

Original CAN/API publication: November 2001