Many people are described as lacking the ability to find their own butts even using both hands. Or, if found, distinguish them from random holes in the earth. This may be related since they may have found their butts but not realized that they had done so. Terry Teachout has apparently made such a discovery.

There was a time not so very long ago, Teachout recalled, when students at Stanford, led by the Reverend Jesse Jackson, stood in the streets crying out: "Hey hey! Ho ho! Western culture's got to go...!" Today, the idea of a cultural majority seems almost quaint. Whatever mainstream culture in the United States might have been at one time, today it has transformed into a series of fragmented communities, identities and demographics. These "lifestyle clusters" are providing an illustration of something that the recent elections have made all too clear: people of differing views are becoming more and more isolated from each other. We are no longer engaged in the battle of the culture wars. We have holed away into our like-minded enclaves for the long, cold culture retreat.

No one knows this better that the original "demography doctor": Michael Weiss. Weiss began writing about the "lifestyle clusters" back in the eighties and he has since authored three books and numerous articles on the subject including "The Clustered World"; "Latitudes and Attitudes" and "The Clustering of America".

The "lifestyle clusters" are predicated on the notion that contemporary citizens create identities through their consumption patterns. This should come as no surprise to anyone. Perhaps more remarkable, according to Weiss, is the fact that consumption patterns have replaced geography as a means of creating alliances and cultural cohesiveness.

They almost understand what's going on. Subcultures have always been defined by consumption. What has changed is that consumption patterns are no longer defined by geography due to the well known and much discussed increases in the scope and scale of communication and transportation. Get it? Consumption patterns haven't replaced geography, they are no longer defined by geography.

There never was a "Western culture" in the sense fantasized by the naive Stanford students. Then, as now and always, there were a bewildering variety of cultures but they were more geographically distinct, even if only separated by a few urban streets and reflecting ethnic division. Now you can find multiple cultures in the same ghetto, and the same (or at least similar) cultures in widely separated but closely communicating places.

It's useful to grasp what has changed in order to assess the significance of the change. The key insight here for the confused Stanford students is that there never was a homogenized culture and never will be one. They were merely rebelling against their own culture as children (however old) often do. That illusion was constructed by broadcast media and mass production; the top down, command and control, steam age ideologies of the time. But it was always an illusion that simply overlooked and excluded the bewildering variety of cultures always present and ever changing.

Even more complex and nuanced are individual identities shifting and multiplying as fragmented modes of culture offer innumerable opportunities to "role play". These identities speak to our inherent curiosity about "trying on" different selves; appropriating gestures and symbols from other groups.

It's both exhilarating and depressing to find even "lifestyle clusters" cannot accommodate the ever-expanding buffet table of freedoms, choices, identities, values and beliefs now being served to the culture of the "individual".

Nothing new here except that it is no longer necessary to relocate to redefine yourself. What was once accomplished by emigration is now accomplished by virtual emigration. What is newish perhaps is that it may no longer be possible for intellectually and emotionally timid souls to stay rooted in a single culture all their lives. The ease and speed of communication and transportation enables an ad-hoc world which is so much more effective it is coming to be pervasive. It isn't that clusters have multiplied so much as that they form and dissolve more quickly. That's an issue with repercussions including some backlash and fretting by observers.