The problem that helped give us Trump

 Sam Smith – Trump is, of course, a huge problem but an even greater one is the culture that has led roughly half our voting population to think he would be good president again. We don’t even talk much about the cultural changes that have altered our land in the past half century or so. It was  a period in which human and community culture was replaced in significant ways by huge organizations   such as media, corporations, public relations, and entertainment ,  which became definers of our culture, leaving us to fit into a massive institutionally defined community.

I sensed this early, although couldn’t have expressed it at the time. I had worked several summers on a farm, had five siblings and a father who was involved in local politics. Community was central to my life. Although I didn’t notice the connection at the time, I also started my high school’s first jazz band – a group of performers who got to solo but most of the time were backing up others in the group, much the way a well functioning community works.

I also took a ninth grade course in anthropology at  a time when there were only two high schools in the country that had one.

Moving on the Harvard College I faced a choice of majors. If I had chosen one of the conventional ones, I might never have made it through. As I described it in my memoirs:

Fortunately, or inevitably, I found a way -- academically and geographically -- to a backwater of the university: the anthropology department, which lived like an Amazonian tribe well off the main campus in the dusty, dim recesses of the Peabody Museum. Out of some four thousand undergraduates, only 20 majored in anthropology, five of them former students of Howard Platt at Germantown Friends School. I had taken a general anthropology course my freshman year and had found it a refuge from the incessant abstractions being discussed elsewhere. To be sure, there were plenty of Principles, Theories, and Categories, but the greater time was spent on observation and reporting, not so far removed from my journalistic interests. Further, once among the artifacts stored with faded labels in long, ancient, wood rimmed cases, or passing a canoe or totem pole en route to class, one felt distinctly free of Harvard, fully liberated from the Major Ideas of Western Civilization. In those dark corridors was the path to a world of variety and exploration, a field trip into all that lay beyond Harvard Square.

I had no intention of actually becoming an anthropologist. There were practical problems such as a sybaritic streak that made unappealing the thought of living months with strangers without radio, bars and jazz. And while the results of archeology were often fascinating, the effort involved in achieving them required a patience well beyond my own. Thus I became something of an oddity within the larger oddity of the department of anthropology: someone majoring in the subject for non-professional reasons. My professors and instructors, however, took no umbrage. They regarded me with the tolerance for which anthropologists are known.

Besides, as I would come to notice, anthropologists were often people who, like myself, were not totally at home in their own culture. You sensed this listening to Clyde Kluckhohn rhapsodize about France while pacing up and down the lecture hall stage in combat boots. Cora Dubois, a onetime student of Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict, strode into class in a trench coat as if just off a flying boat from the Pacific and held me enthralled as she described the sex lives of the people of Alor, a small island in the Dutch East Indies where she had spent considerable time in the late 1930s, living alone and handing out medical supplies to win over the villagers….

It was DuBois who wrote on my paper concerning the Nagas of India: "This is pretty good journalism but it is bad anthropology."

Ten words that guided me on my way. But lately I’ve come to realize that I have covered news in a way far more friendly with anthropology then, say, CNN. After all, as Wikipedia explains, “ Anthropology is the scientific study of humanity, concerned with human behavior, human biology, cultures, societies, and linguistics, in both the present and past, including archaic humans.”

I have spent my life mainly covering humanity, cultures and societies rather than institutions, corporations and the concepts they sell. How different is this? Well, a recent report found 9300 anthropology majors in the US, compared to 113,000 majoring in business.

Today I live in a small town in Maine and have not run into a single person remotely like Donald Trump. You learn in places like this to work with others, not control, manipulate, or engage them in verbal complexity. And to be more human.

This is not a new problem created by Donald Trump. In fact, I stumbled upon a speech I gave back in 2001 at the 100^th anniversary of the Berkeley School of Anthropology in which I put it this way:

There is, for all of us the problem that the nature of culture is drastically changing from being something in which the individual is indoctrinated and absorbed, towards something the individual must preserve, restore or recreate in order to avoid the destruction of all culture save that of the corporate market and the political systems that support it. Whether we like it or not, as reporters or anthropologists we are forced every day to join others in either strengthening or destroying culture. We can write about it dispassionately later but this afternoon we are all part of the problem. We must find ways to blend the detachment of our trades with our existential responsibilities. We live in what Marshall Blonsky has called a semiosphere which bombards us with the UV rays of advertising, propaganda, and interminable sounds and sights devoid of meaning - and which is controlled in large part by multinational corporations whose intentions include the destruction of both culture and individuality. Their goal, well described by the French writer Jacques Attali, is an "ideologically homogenous market where life will be organized around common consumer desires."

This new world is unlike any in human history - a world in which the destruction of cultural and individual variety is high on the agenda of the earth's political and business leaders; our human nature being to them not a reason for existing but just another obstacle in their path to power. The strategies by which this onslaught can be countered depend on the imagination, passion, obstinacy, and creativity of ordinary people who refuse their consumptive assignments in the global marketplace, who develop autonomous alternatives, and who laugh when they are supposed to be saluting.

The business of constructing culture is no longer an inherited and precisely defined task but a radical act demonstrating to others that they are not alone and to ourselves that we are still human. We badly need you in this. Join the fray, celebrate what you have found, help us to preserve all our various selves, help us to replace what has been lost, and help us to avoid ending up with nothing but dead bones and still shards - the archeology of human hope that no longer exists.