Soft Power and the Demise of "Free" CultureBy Chris Castle on February 5, 2009
Appointments in the Obama Administration make it clearer every day that the President fully understands the fundamental economic principle taught in every freshman econ class around the world--there is no such thing as a "free" culture.
This realization is of particular importance at a time when our international relations are in dire need of improvement. Our foreign policy professionals require all the tools they can get their hands on to build a vibrant cross-cultural human network. These concepts are familiar to readers of Joseph Nye's Soft Power and the recent report of the Center for Strategic and International Studies Smart Power Commission.
"Smart power" is a foreign policy doctrine originated at CSIS that balances the use of "hard power" (such as weapons) with "soft power" (a country's cultural attractiveness) to win the battle for hearts and minds as well as military victories.
The inventory of soft power opportunities range from hospital ships to the Voice of America, vaccination programs to academic exchanges. But soft power also includes popular culture, preferably a robust popular culture. More people in the world know of Louis Armstrong than know of Allen Dulles. And probably adore Satchmo a lot more. He didn't play music because he wanted to be "Ambassador Satch," but he became one of America's greatest cultural ambassadors because he could earn a living playing music.
There are few countries that have benefited more than the United States from the attractiveness of its ubiquitous popular culture. While Professor Nye does not expressly offer a correlation between the ability of the creative community to sustain itself as a measurement of the success of soft power as a foreign policy objective, Nye probably didn't think it necessary to make that connection when he first articulated these concepts in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The economic liberties and labor value that fuels the engine of popular culture were not then under attack.
But they are now. Because in order for popular culture to remain part of the tools available to those charged with operating a successful foreign policy for the United States, it is of critical importance that American culture survive and be regenerated, not fail and be regurgitated.
The importance of these tools are not to be underestimated. Professor Nye notes in Soft Power "[l]ong before the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, it had been pierced by [music,] television and movies.... Lennon trumped Lenin.... One [Chinese] dissident told a foreign reporter [during the Tiananmen Square massacre] that when she was forced to listen to local Communist Party leaders rage about America, she would hum Bob Dylan tunes in her head as her own silent revolution."
These are all examples of the importance of maintaining cultural contact with both our friends and enemies. Unfortunately, the engine that drives the production of popular culture around the world is under attack online at levels that surpass anything experienced in the physical world.
Whether that attack succeeds or fails determines the availability of these smart power options.
Ivory tower "free culture" apologists and their followers position an artist's struggle for economic freedom as a "war" that pits "Silicon Valley" (aka "innovation") against "Hollywood" (aka "Hollywood"). This view misses the point--absent a respect for fundamental economic freedom and for labor value, arguing over control of the distribution channel is a rather meaningless exercise in wedge politics.
Many of these same "free culture" academics incongruously champion the Internet as democratizing the distribution channel so the "little guy" can circumvent "Hollywood" while they simultaneously beat the drum for a government-mandated compulsory license and government-mandated pricing for all content. The rationale often heard for these extremist wage controls is that the current crisis online has produced a "market failure." Yet a fundamental element of a market is respect for basic economic rights would afford creators the ability to sustain themselves from their work product. Absent these rights there is no market, and therefore there can be no market failure.
If these basic rights are not protected, the distribution channel eventually will fill with net pollution and will be of less value to everyone. That's already happening.
Once talent is lost, it is lost forever. If it is extraordinarily difficult for creators to earn a living, there will not be another extraordinary "Ambassador Satch."
So when considering popular culture as a component of soft power in formulating foreign policy, our government ought to start at home by protecting the fundamental economic liberties that sustain the creative community both offline and online and reward the labor value of creators.
http://blog.artsandlabs.com/2009/02/soft-power-and-the-demise-of-free-culture.html
