The moment a people acquires a certain awareness of an activity as being part of its "culture," at that moment the activity begins to cease being a part of that people’s living culture, and begins to be transformed into something else, something that might be art, or politics, or civil religion, but no longer exists as culture. At a certain moment of self-consciousness, culture ceases to exist because culture, in the truest sense, consists of activities that are carried on for the most part unselfconsciously in the everyday course of the life of a people. According to this formulation "culture" is mostly, if not always, unselfconscious. "Non-culture," for lack of better word, is artificial and self-conscious.

One can hardly speak of one’s own "cultural activities." To speak of them as such is to begin to destroy their character as cultural activities. Similarly, one absolutely cannot--not purposefully--preserve one’s own culture because a purposeful act of "cultural preservation" requires a degree of self-consciousness corrosive to genuine living culture.

Culture is never preserved. Culture is lived. And living (in case you hadn't noticed) is a mostly unselfconscious activity. What we call "cultural preservation" is actually a formalized entombment of never-living, dead, or dying cultures.

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The most conspicuous example today of "non-culture" presented as "culture" is Kwanza. Culture might well involve celebration, but culture itself can never be the thing celebrated. Genuine culture cannot exist as a celebration of itself. When a people purports to celebrate its culture, the very activity in which that people consciously engages, ostensibly in celebration of its culture, is no longer truly part of that people’s culture (if it ever were), and the culture purportedly being celebrated has become moribund (if it ever were alive). Such a celebration is, at best, some sort of staged re-enactment, not so different from a re-enactment of a Civil War battle. The staged affair might well be art or drama or political theater; it might even be historically accurate, but it is not culture. It is not the artificiality or the historical inaccuracy of Kwanza that distinguishes it as non-culture. It is the self-consciousness of the endeavor that renders it inauthentic non-culture.

A people’s genuine culture, like an individual person’s breathing, is carried on normally and naturally without thinking, the difference being that when a person reflects upon his act of breathing he can still breathe. His natural rhythm of breathing, burdened by thought, will become artificial and labored, yet he does not stop breathing and expire. But when a people begins to reflect upon its culture as culture, the aspect of culture upon which that people reflects ceases to exist as culture for that people.

Unlike a person who thinks about breathing, yet still breathes, if a people thinks too much about its culture, that people might cease to exist as a people. A culture cannot exist among a people with a refined consciousness of its culture as "culture." Yet a people cannot exist as a people unless its members share a culture.

This formulation of "culture" excludes not only Kwanza and Native American Pow Wow dances, but also all of what we think of as "high-culture," the latter for the very reason that production or participation in high-culture requires self-examination antithetical to unselfconscious action. High-culture is trans-cultural, and therefore not culture of the sort that is attached to or "belongs to" a people. On the other hand, the very word "culture" denotes a civilized refinement of natural growth--the difference between a thing growing wild and a thing that grows in a certain way because it has been attended to purposefully, if not obviously. So one can’t insist upon this formulation of culture as comprehensive. Yet this formulation is somehow fundamentally accurate and sheds some strong light on contemporary American culture.

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Yes, there is a genuine contemporary American culture.

Nowadays one could say that the archetypal American cultural activity is the activity of celebrating culture. In other words, our culture is to "celebrate culture." Our culture is to "preserve culture."

This is both strange and seemingly contradictory.

How strange it is that, with all our Greek Festivals, Italian Festivals, Asian Festivals, Korea Festivals, Polish Festivals, Kwanzas and Pow Wows (and one might even go so far as to include our religious celebrations as well), the foremost cultural activity of American life today is the entombment of non-living or dying cultures, an entombment we accomplish through the very act of "celebrating" these cultures.

How much stranger and seemingly contradictory it is that this hyper-romantic activity of entombing non-living and dying cultures, though excessively self-consciously concerned with the idea of culture, nonetheless begins to qualify as "culture" for us because the activity of entombing is carried on without consciousness of what is actually being done.

We self-consciously believe we are celebrating culture, but the self-consciousness precludes the possibility of any of the cultures we purport to celebrate being our own true culture. At the same time, we unselfconsciously entomb the cultures we purport to celebrate. Thus, not the cultures celebrated, but the activities of mummification and entombment, which we call "cultural preservation," are our true culture. Our self-conscious intent to celebrate diverse cultures is the very thing that finishes them off. At the same time, our lack of awareness that, by "celebrating cultures," we are clumsily yet thoroughly finishing them off, makes these celebrations of culture our genuine culture.

So, as of now, our predominant "cultural activity" in America consists of an interminable wake for dead, dying, or never-living cultures. Would knowledge of that fact begin the process of entombing the contemporary American culture which itself entombs other cultures? Thence the possibility of a return to a more unselfconscious development--from our own shared experience of everyday life--of a genuine American culture, one less strange and contradictory?