Deneen contra monoculture

There's some discussion in the Wheat Rust thread below about how agricultural monocultures may increase yield, but leave us particularly vulnerable to plant disease. That brought to mind this typically thoughtful meditation on monocultures from Patrick Deneen, which I meant to link to the other day. Excerpt:

Nature abhors monocultures. Nature abhors them so much that they do not exist in accordance with nature. They would be unknown but for modern man.

A monoculture is a single form of life - or, by extension, a single culture - that exists over a large expanse of space, even globally. Nature abhors monocultures because they are so susceptible to annihilation by one agent of destruction. In plant or animal life, for example, a single virus or bacteria, a single destructive fungus or disease, a single hostile predator or pest would wipe out an entire monoculture without the barest resistance. It is the very nature of nature to avoid monocultures - indeed, it cannot be otherwise since any form of monoculture cannot long exist in nature. Life in the natural realm is manifold and varied, precisely so that some life will weather the inevitable deadly challenges that arise.

It could be posited that modernity is defined by the introduction of monocultures. In politics, thinkers like Hobbes and Locke articulate the first universal and anti-cultural theory of politics, obliterating considerations of local culture, history and tradition in the name of a singular and monolithic conception of political legitimacy. In economics, thinkers such as Adam Smith introduce a world-transforming economic theory that renders the entire globe subject to the logic of the market. In the sciences, thinkers like Bacon, Descartes and Spinoza introduce a method that renders all local knowledge irrelevant to the specialized knowledge of the expert, the universally valid findings of science.

We live at a moment of monoculture's triumph - and demise. Around us is the evidence of the near-total victory of monocultures in nearly every field of human activity, at the same time that the recklessness and fragility of monocultures comes ever more fully into focus.

Read the whole thing -- especially Deneen's withering critique of colleges' and universities' role in creating rootless barbarians to serve the market monoculture.

I agree with most of this, but here's where I object -- and it's not so much as an objection as a questioning of the theory he lays out in hopes of refining it. How can we cultural conservatives complain about monoculture quashing diversity while at the same time lamenting the fragmentation of culture owing to the triumph of autonomous individualism?

The answer, I think, has to do with several things.

First, the idea that the diversity our official culture pays so much lip service to is a sham diversity; you are allowed to be as diverse as you want, unless you challenge a rather narrow set of ideals that the cultural leaders take as universally true. One example: In my line of work, media, executives agonize endlessly over increasing diversity in the newsroom, which they take to mean race and gender. Ask them if they ever think about working to get more religious or political diversity among their reporting staff, and if they consider that important, and they have nothing to say because clearly, they haven't, and don't make this a priority. This is how it works.

A second, and related, idea is the failure to appreciate how prizing individual freedom above other values, especially in the economic realm, works in favor of monoculture at a certain level. Bill McKibben's book "Deep Economy," which I've just started, is about the value of building local economies that can be relatively self-sufficient. You can't build these diverse deep local economies if your educated professional class -- the doctors, the lawyers, and so on -- see their futures not as tied to the places from where they came, but rather become itinerant by choice, going wherever the market takes them. Pretty soon, you become itinerant by necessity, because the local economy that might have had a place for you in the past no longer does. Similarly, small towns that used to have a variety of merchants selling things have in many, many cases fallen victim to the Wal-Mart monoculture. If Wal-Mart's business model collapsed -- and insofar as it's predicated on cheap manufacturing and transport, it is particularly vulnerable -- you would see how vulnerable much of America has let itself become to merchandising monoculture.

Third, I think it has to be counted as a good thing that there is far more aesthetic diversity today than there used to be. Teenagers today have an incomparably greater array of music to choose from than we did when I was a kid. It's much, much easier to get a good variety of food and drink today than it was 30 years ago. The De-Schlitzification of American Beer Culture is a great triumph, if you ask me. But how important, ultimately, is that? Very important to aesthetes like Your Working Boy, but in the end, is the diversification of taste really all that significant to Deneen's point -- except insofar as it makes it possible to build diverse local economies?

Fourth, and relatedly, I think what conservatives and traditionalists would like to see is more of a (Judeo-Christian) monoculture in morality -- because we believe that morality isn't relative, but expressive of a transcendent moral order -- but diversity in local customs and expressions of culture. In other words, to paraphrase St. Augustine, unity in essentials, liberty in non-essentials, and in all things charity. Trads have a clear idea of what counts as essential. Would we really be opposed to a moral monoculture centered around Christian moral precepts? I don't think so. In fact, one of the key themes of our writing is recognizing that a culture that does not share a common understanding of what is and isn't forbidden lacks the organizing principle of any culture, and will fall to pieces. If this is not an argument in favor of monoculture to a certain extent, what is it? How can we refuse moral diversity (which is to say, indifference) as bad for a culture but at the same time criticize monoculture?

Best I can figure is that the culture we're building of laissez-faire morality is in fact a monoculture built around what Marcuse (of all people!) identified as "repressive tolerance." Obviously Marcuse, a Marxist, meant it in a very different context, but I'm wondering to what extent it applies here, insofar as moral relativism disempowers any tradition claiming authority. This is what Pope Benedict meant by "the dictatorship of relativism" -- the monoculture of relativism, which sounds like a paradox, but really isn't. What we trads object to, it seems, is a market-based libertarian monoculture that offers a simulacrum of diversity while really working to kick out the foundations for any kind of stable culture that dissents from its foundational precepts.

But that's just off the top of my head. We will have to wait for Deneen and Larison and Stooksbury to weigh in before the true answer will be revealed to us!