I think cultural influence and power outlasts and lags peak military or economic power. Greek culture with the rise of Rome, Roman culture during the post-Roman period in the West, and Italian art as the locus of power was shifting north in Europe during the early modern period. The glamor of culture, history, and the past, can echo down centuries after temporal power fades (ask the Bishop of Rome!).
So it will be with American culture. But there’s also something in our highly exportable popular culture which is becoming highly derivative, recycling 20th-century motifs over and over. Influential, but perhaps not original.
But should we be embarrassed by this? Or surprised? The Italian peninsula had a second efflorescence during the Renaissance, but Greece has never been as influential or original as it was in the 5th century BC.
We are multitudes.
What American culture has going for it, is that the United States is very big and much more diverse than many of its peers and that, as a result it is really many cultures at various points along a life span of waxing and then waning.
Some American subcultures, like that associated with mainline churchgoers in small towns, have already waned to the point where they have little spillover impact despite a rear guard action by people like Ross Douthat to maintain its continued relevance in the national conversation (while he is Catholic, his agenda is more attached to the old mainline Christian small town sensibility). It is no longer exported by the U.S. in a meaningful way (we now have African and Asian missionaries trying to win over souls in the U.S., instead of the other way around), it is even further decayed in peer Western and Northern European countries, and has ceased to be relevant in the national scene in the U.S. The National Council of Churches, for example, has almost no political clout, despite purporting to represent 38 denominations with more than 40 million members.
Other U.S. national subcultures are vibrant and actively influencing the rest of the world and will continue to do so for a long time to come.
For example, a gay rights movement that pretty much started in cities where the U.S. military had a policy of dumping soldiers and sailors discharge for being gay who swept the world in a heart beat as far as social change goes, in a movement that was tiny when I was born, when its prospects of success seemed to be nil.
There were not more than one or two out homosexual students, no out homosexual faculty or staff, and there was no one who identified as non-binary gender in my high school with 1200 students when I graduated in 1989 in a small college town in Ohio. My children in an inner city Denver high school with a similar number of students over the last six years have had at least half a dozen close, out, gay or lesbian friends (despite both currently having serious opposite sex significant others and neither having ever had an out same sex significant other), there was a thriving student club in the high school, and there is strong teacher and administration support for tolerance. My children have also had openly gay teachers, an openly gay Governor (previously a Congressman from a neighboring district) and have met a previous gay speaker of the state house and a previous lesbian gay speaker of the state house. We live in a state with anti-discrimination laws based on sexual orientation and a nationally recognized constitutional right to gay marriage that would have been unthinkable when I was in college and law school. Gay rights have spread from the U.S. to countries all over the world (although, of course, not all of them).
Different components of American culture and ideas have different levels of influence.
As one Silicon Valley type speaking on political issues once said, the U.S. political system is the M.S. Dos of national political systems. It’s outdated and there are far superior alternatives out there. So, no one is copying our political system. And that part of our society is not influential at all.
But, the U.S. higher education system, especially at the graduate level in the STEM fields, is still pre-eminent globally and highly influential. It may not have a monopoly on elite graduate level instruction and research, but it does have a greatly outsized influence and drains top talent from other countries all over the world.
Disaggregation of the whole is one reason that significant widespread influence will continue for a longer time than it might in a small, more homogeneous nation entering a period of overall declining influence. Some bright spots of American culture will continue to progress and be actively influential for a long time, not just regurgitating but innovating.
As another example, while many countries with formerly established religious have secularized and displayed fairly similar trajectories in how that has happened, the U.S. is half a century behind in that trend and will innovate in different ways because disestablishment is not an issue. The non-religious movement in America is actively rewriting a wide swath of culture scripts on a day be day basis as I write, and those new scripts will have broad international influence just as the gay rights movement has so far.
And, simply being large and unified can give a system staying power. The Ottoman Empire was a dead man walking in West Eurasia for centuries before its demise. The American Empire has at least as much inertia and its decline is just decades old at most so far.
American culture? America has a culture in the same way that yogurt has a culture.
Funny you should mention the Romans and the Italian Renaissance.
If you go to Rome, be sure to see the Basilica of St. Mary of the Angels and the Martyrs. It is across the piazza from the main railroad station. It was built inside the ruined frigidarium of the Roman Baths of Diocletian in the 16th century following an original design by Michelangelo Buonarroti.
Stand in the middle of the Church and try to appreciate what Michelangelo did with the space. When you are done there, walk 2 Km up the Via Nazionale to the Capitoline Hill to see Micheangelo’s Campidoglio, his redesign and reimagining of the Capitoline Hill.
It is another short walk down hill to see the church of Saint Peter in Chains where Pope Julius II is buried underneath Michelangelo’s statue of Moses.
Call me unpatriotic, but as some French Guy put it: “America is the only country in history that has passed directly from barbarism to decadence without passing through civilization at all”
But what will supersede it? No matter how economically dominant China becomes, I don’t see it being as successful at exporting culture as we have been. Just not their style.
Maybe this was it and from here on out it’s a largely uniform global culture — of course spiced with some regional differences, though significantly flattened out and with no single cultural hegemon to aspire to.
“So it will be with American culture. But there’s also something in our highly exportable popular culture which is becoming highly derivative, recycling 20th-century motifs over and over. Influential, but perhaps not original.”
I think that this is a function of intellectual orthodoxy of Hollywood. As the list of prohibited (or worse quasi-prohibited) topics expands, career-supporting creativity declines.
My favorite example is the corporation as the uber-villan. This trope is pretty common in movies (and, unfortunately, video games). Historically, however, the main producers of human misery have been governments, but the evil corporation is more in line with Marxist narrative.
I’m actually a bit positive here — I think and hope the tide will turn. I think we saw something like this in the 1950s when the Hollywood started to become more (overtly?) anti-American.
I do think that part of success of GoT was that its plot lines did not follow well trodden story lines. The main good guy in Season 1 was executed by the main bad guy — holy shit!!! — that’s not supposed to happen!
Walter Sobchak:”American culture? America has a culture in the same way that yogurt has a culture.”
Dunno. I think that Anglo-America has done OK: Howard Hawks, Mark Twain, Buster Keaton, Poe, Melville, Hawthorne, William James, John Ford, DW Griffith, The Chrysler Building, Faulkner, Robert Frost, …..
cole porter.
“The Italian peninsula had a second efflorescence during the Renaissance, but Greece has never been as influential or original as it was in the 5th century BC.”
Although the US is a product of European civilization, I think that it is more comparable to China than to individual European nation-states.
These geographically/demographically small to medium states can sustain empires for quite some time but when decline comes, it is steep. The metropole is simply too small to sustain any pretension to global power/influence. The smaller the original European nation-state the higher the fall from power is. Belgium does not matter at all, while France still has a seat on the Security Council.
The US is a European style state that has achieved continental size from which retreat is very much unlikely; its metropole is larger than Europe. The US does not derive its global power/relevance from holding India or the East Indies, but from within its own borders. China has/will always matter and the same is true of the United States.
OW: Belgium was never really an empire (apart from its king having Congo. Some might claim that even now it is not even a nation). Try Lithuania, Sweden or Austria for better examples.
Another observation: USA and China are about the same size and on the same latitudes. The former has access to two oceans, while the long term goal of the latter is to secure access even to one.
Regarding the American Culture and another recent thread, “What will be remembered in thousand years?”. Hollywood’s movie industry certainly produced a lot. But if the modern Woke-religion would slowly obtain the same dominating status as the Christianity obtained in Rome (like the latter, also the former is spreading in and from the cities), it would view most 20th century movies with the same disdain the early Christians must have viewed the pagan art, as most old movies have values so antithetical to its own. (“Masculine men as heroes?!”, “People eating, what, _meat_?”)
But renaissances always occur, even after long periods of darkness.
Walter Sobchak
I disagree. The French speak a variant of Vulgar Latin, looked down as barbaric by the elites of Rome in the same way French look down upon America. And the Greeks looked down upon Latin as uncivilized. The yogurt analogy or at least its gist would have been used by Egyptians regarding Greeks, Greeks regarding Romans, and Romans regarding their Gallic subjects. And now those Gallic subjects say it about Americans. History keeps repeating.