Page 152 - CULTURE IN THE COMMUNICATION AGE

SUPERCULTURE FOR THE COMMUNIC ATION AG E

work discursively in global politics, especially foreign policy discussions. Within
those political discourses universalism has even been appropriated by the West
in a quasi-religious way. Former American President George Bush claimed to
speak on behalf of the entire global population in the early 1990s, for instance,
when he referred to a post-Cold-War ‘new world order’ in defense of his
military intervention in Iraq. In a world of ‘shared principles’, Bush told the
fl
American public in his 1991 State of the Union address, ‘America has selessly
confronted evil for the sake of good in a land so far away’. Universalist dis-
courses have become a stamp of American political imaging, a strategy that
tries to mainstream global consciousness into an American perspective. For
example, former President Bill Clinton told a televised gathering at Beijing
University in 1998 that the right to free expression, association, and religion
‘are not American rights or European rights or developed world rights . . .
these are the birthrights of people everywhere’. The triumph of global capital-
ism over communism in the late twentieth century is often said to validate the
belief that Western values are universal, or at least they should be.
We need not further berate American foreign policy (though that’s never a
completely bad idea). In practise, ‘universal values’ will never materialize as
globally standardized cultural values. They will however remain highly visible
discursive themes. Mass media play a crucial role. The widespread visibility of
universalist themes derives in considerable measure from the fact that (mainly
Western) international news media create stories that are framed around a sen-
sationalized moral tension concerning abuses of ‘human rights’, the best
example of which may be the persistent accusations of the People’s Republic
of China. Organizations such as Amnesty International help to arrange the
agenda for news coverage of such stories, perhaps most famously the reports
about the plight of the indigenous population in Chiapas, Mexico.
Human rights may be the most visible of the universal domains, but people
also have a sense of shared standards of aesthetics and physical beauty, of basic
sexual and survival needs, and of common forms of emotion and expression.
Media play a major role in bringing these rather abstract commonalities out
too. In his cautiously optimistic assessment of television’s influence on culture,
for example, Ulf Hannerz points out that ‘the sight of starving children in
Ethiopia, or of victims of a grenade thrown into a Sarajevo market . . . seems
capable of provoking a kind of electronic empathy, a view of the other which
has more to do with notions of shared human nature than with cultivated
differences’ (Hannerz 1996: 121).
Universalism is itself not a cultural effect, result, or conclusion but a process
of global recognition that resonates with the ideologies and cultural values of
major societal institutions – religious organizations, political treaties, national
constitutions, and the international mass media among them. What matters in
construction of the superculture is the discursive presence of the universal
cultural themes, not any pretense of essential truth or global consensus.
Universal themes enter human experience discursively where they encourage

141