meeting

An American in Rimini

LIBERALISM
The Meeting as seen by the editor of the most important liberal weekly in the United States. A comparison with events on the other side of the Atlantic similar to the big fair in Rimini. The surprise of something new and desirable for America

 BY PETER BEINART

Peter Beinart, 29, is the Editor-in-Chief of the weekly, The New Republic, which for over 80 years has been considered the voice of American liberalism. Peter Berkowitz (professor at George Mason University Law School) is one of its leading editorialists. Its editorials are a point of reference on various issues–whether for reaching accord or as a spur for critical debate–for the political world revolving around Washington. Now, a former contributor to the journal, Al Gore, could be the next President of the United Sates.
The audience at the Meeting for Friendship Among Peoples (in Rimini) had the chance this year to listen to Beinart and Berkowitz, together with Monsignor Albacete, at the session on liberalism in America. We asked Peter Beinart to give us his impressions after his visit to the Rimini Meeting.

Peter Berkowitz (my fellow panelist and fellow American) and I spent a good deal of our time at “The Meeting” trying to understand why such a thing didn’t take place in the United States. And if the Meeting was characterized by generous praise of American culture, I’m afraid that our private discussion was somewhat more pessimistic.
Why did the Meeting seem so unAmerican? Because it transcended divisions that in the United States are rarely, if ever, bridged. Perhaps the best way to explain why the Meeting seemed so exotic, and so impressive, to American eyes is to try to describe the closest American equivalents. As you’ll see, they are not very close.

The Christian Coalition

The Christian Coalition was founded about a decade ago to organize Christians concerned about America’s moral decline. It is a large organization, with chapters in every state in America, and every year, its members meet in Washington, DC. The Christian Coalition and CL share certain characteristics. The most basic is that they are both religious groups. But the Christian Coalition is seen as sectarian–although the group includes Catholics (and has even tried to reach out to Jews), it is generally viewed as controlled by evangelical Protestants. This points to the first problem of having something like the Meeting in the United States. Italy is an overwhelmingly Catholic country; secularists might dislike the Meeting, but not many religious people will see it as a threat to their faith because there are not that many religious non-Catholics in Italy. But because America is a country with no dominant religious denomination, anytime a group tries to bring a religious perspective into a public debate that is at all sectarian, people from other denominations worry that it will lead to intolerance, even discrimination. Many Jews, and even many Catholics, therefore, see the Christian Coalition as threatening. The only acceptable religious discourse in American public life is a completely ecumenical one–and total ecumenicism creates theological superficiality. And that is why religious discussion in America is usually either polarizing or meaningless. There have been exceptions, such as the civil rights movement, which employed religious language for a universal moral purpose, but that was in the 1960s, before the culture war became a defining aspect of American politics.
Which brings me to the second reason the Christian Coalition annual meeting is a poor approximation of the Meeting. The Christian Coalition is a product of the culture war–the post-1960s idea that American traditional morality and religion are under siege by secular, avant-garde elites. This point of view, of course, is associated with the Republican Party, which is why the Christian Coalition is generally seen as partisan. In fact, many of the speakers at its annual meeting are Republican politicians. But it is not just that the Christian Coalition, unlike the Meeting, is partisan. The even more fundamental difference is that the “culture war” divide in the United States makes the Christian Coalition instinctively hostile to almost everything in the secular culture–the humanities, the arts, even the sciences. So while the Meeting puts on concerts and lectures and exhibits that have no explicitly religious themes, the Christian Coalition does not believe that there is any such cultural middle ground–you are either with them or against them. American film, American theater, the American art world, the top American universities, even biology departments that teach evolution–all these are seen as hostile, and so the cultural expression at the Christian Coalition meeting is defensive, parochial, and anti-intellectual. All the things the Meeting is not.

The Modern Language Association

The MLA is the umbrella organization for American humanities scholars, particularly professors of literature. Politically, it is diametrically opposed to the Christian Coalition–very hostile to traditional religion. And so here, of course, it differs from the Meeting. But like the Meeting, and unlike the Christian Coalition, it is intellectually serious–it draws from the cutting edge of American academia and American cultural life. The problem is that it is “professionalized” and remote from even well-educated ordinary Americans. As a group of professors, the MLA has developed an intellectual discourse that exists completely within the universities–often literally incomprehensible to non-academics. This is the result of the “professionalization” of the American academy, in which American academics have explicitly tried to set themselves above popular writers by creating a technical jargon with which popular writers (and popular readers) cannot engage. As a result, while thousands of Italians visit the Meeting and understand its panels and exhibits, Americans could never do the same at the MLA conference. And far from considering that a flaw, the leaders of the MLA understand that this isolation is what justifies their existence.

Epcot Center at Disney World

Disney World in Orlando, Florida, has a section called “Epcot Center” which contains exhibits and rides featuring the countries of the world and the inventions of the future. Of course, Epcot differs from the Meeting in that it is not religious. But unlike the Christian Coalition and the Modern Language Association, it is a mass event–just as the Meeting draws thousands of vacationing Italians, Epcot draws thousands (in fact, millions) of vacationing Americans. Like the Meeting and unlike the Christian Coalition and the MLA, Epcot is not associated with one side in the culture war; it has a broad appeal and is not politicized. The problem is that in the United States, most of the cultural space that is neutral in the culture war is corporate. And Epcot, like Disney World as a whole, is entirely created by, and pays homage to, corporations. This is the final reason America doesn’t have an equivalent to the Meeting–it is not just that America is divided between different religious denominations, between different sides in a culture war, and between an insular academy and popular discourse; America is also too thoroughly saturated by capitalism. America’s brand of free market ideology does not give Americans enough vacation time to spend weeks volunteering at an event like the Meeting. But more than that, American capitalism places a primacy on work that makes people feel that they should spend their extra time working more–not on “hobbies” like CL. The Meeting has corporate sponsors, but they are in the background and do not define the event. But in America, especially in the last decade, corporate principles have come to define much of the public, secular, ostensibly apolitical cultural terrain. And that means that Epcot–or for that matter Hollywood–is much more bland, much less intellectual, and much less grassroots than the Meeting. At the Meeting, you can debate whether the future looks promising or bleak, and whether Italy is progressing or regressing. At Epcot, America is always wonderful, and the future is always bright. There is nothing but progress–and progress means a world becoming more and more corporate, just like Epcot.

When will the Meeting be held in America?

Can this change? Perhaps. By some accounts, the culture war is fading. Promise Keepers, for instance, a religious group aimed at restoring moral responsibility, is much less partisan than the Christian Coalition and as a result has attracted non-evangelicals and even some non-conservatives. The academy is unpopular, and under increasing economic pressure, and may be forced to radically restructure, which could make it less insular. Corporate culture has produced a backlash in recent years–for instance, at the anti-globalization protests last December in Seattle. The problem is that the response is so political and so radical that it has limited appeal. But if there was a less political, more cultural response–one that saw itself as intellectual but not esoteric, religious but not parochial, maybe an American version of the Meeting would be possible. It’s hard to imagine today, but there is no question that America would be a richer, more vibrant and more decent place as a result.