Note: The following theoretical system of cultural analysis is based in part on research funded by (among others): NORAD (North American Air Defense Command), RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America— Liechtenstein branch), MLA (Modern Language Association— après-Frankfurt-School division), AADA (American Automobile Dealers Association— Consumer Rebate Committee), and the Guggenheim Foundation (Pago Pago Wing for Oceanic Hip-hop Culture). The author is grateful for the support provided by these far-sighted organizations but of course assumes full personal responsibility for all conclusions below based on said research.

Though firmly grounded in physical reality, human beings when they behave culturally delight in pretending they are rational consciousnesses whose bodies are wholly in their service. Thus, when we write history, we speak of Caesar deciding this, Napoleon reacting to that, and so on.

The fact is, from birth to death, we are a consciousness awash in the unceasing ebb and flow of powerful, indeed irresistible chemicals called hormones. Whether it's you thinking about getting laid tonight or Napoleon figuring out what to do about Waterloo, it's chemicals calling the shots, chemicals from our very own built-in suppliers.

Evolutionarily, these chemicals, which are after all produced by our own bodies, may have arisen to some good survival-promoting purpose. Now, in this time of High Civilization, they are more often than not an embarrassment, and we all go a long way out of our way to pretend that they—and their powerful effects—do not exist.

My research is based on the assumption that all, ALL our beautiful abstractions in government, religion, art, science, are based in and shaped by this tidal ebb and flow of chemicals in our bodies.

Here I have space only for a brief (and I hope tantalizing) summary of my findings. A book-length report to be called "SLOSH!" will follow next year, simultaneous with the showing of a ten-part PBS series hosted by Bill Moyers.

Among the many startling results of our study, none surprised us as much as the discovery that various nation-state groupings of human beings are dominated and indeed defined by different hormones.

FRANCE: The Prolactites
For example, French culture with its heavy emphasis on oral gratification (food, wine, sauces) and its tendency to reduce everything else to will-o’-the-wisp ironic abstraction has long been a puzzle. We believe we have solved the mystery.

Our research, which consisted of telemetric monitoring of 97,312 French persons of all ages and economic backgrounds over a 24-hour period, revealed that to be French means you swim in a level of the hormone prolactin, far higher than that experienced by any other group in the world.

Prolactin is the hormone which promotes milk production. Evolutionarily, of course, it arose to provide direct sustenance from the female mammal to the newborn offspring.

Today, in France, indeed every day in France, the hormone prolactin rages out of control, producing a populace which, to use the common term, desires nothing so much as to feed its face. So dominant is this hormonal effect that the best and brightest French minds find themselves eating, drinking, and smoking all the time, and then, in a kind of yin-yang effect, using their minds to try to escape this mushing about in food, by creating worlds of purest abstract theory in art, literature, and the movies. How else to understand a culture that reveres Jerry Lewis if not by clearly seeing its prolactin-induced infantile oral fixation?

CHINA: Applied Estrogenics
Another of the world's most celebrated but least understood cultures is that of China.

Given our initial and surprising discovery of the prolactic basis of French culture, we thought, as we approached China, that we might find the same hormone at play there. Though the Chinese, with typical understatement, do not make the big public, hey-watch-me-cook! thing out of food that the French do, there’s no doubt that the art of food preparation and consumption is one of the pinnacle achievements of Chinese civilization.

To our surprise, our 114,795 Chinese subjects displayed a reduced prolactin load. A bit of thoughtful analysis led us to conclude that the difference between France and China, re food, is that the French are basically just feeding their hormonal habit, satisfying the hormonal monkey on their backs; while for the Chinese, food, over many millennia of struggle, has been a hard-won necessity and is treated as a result with great respect.

Yet another surprise was in store as we analyzed our munched-out Chinese subjects. Not much prolactin, but… a huge overdose of estrogen.

Estrogen, commonly understood as the primary controlling chemical behind female sexual characteristics, apparently combined with a certain tendency toward over-population in East Asia, to produce a great family-centered civilization, along with millennia of art and philosophy which can only be described as lissomely seductive.

Those stereotyped Chinese characteristics that the West has read as obscurantist and inscrutable and mysterious are now revealed to be only the outward and visible effects of a culture shaped by the chemical of patient, all-comprehending, passive beauty.

USA: Rampant Glucagonism
With these preliminary studies—full of surprises—behind us, we were eager to get to work on the present dominant world culture. What, we wondered, as we started our researches in the United States, would we find in this most diverse of societies? Given the well-known and highly visible violence of American life, many of us expected to find an ocean of testosterone here.

But no. What we in fact discovered in 202, 917 Americans (and, by the way, the largest national group we studied) was not just an ocean but many oceans of… glucagon!

"Huh?" you may ask. "Glucagon? What is glucagon?"

Glucagon is the hormone responsible for raising the blood sugar level (and works in conjunction with its opposite, insulin, which lowers blood sugar levels).

At first, as we reviewed our results, we were baffled. On the one hand, we looked at the richly violent panoply of American life and culture, and on the other, we looked at… glucagon? Where was the connection?

What could glucagon have to do with, say, Iraq, or Microsoft, or MTV? Not to mention Donald Trump, Nancy Reagan, and Bryant Gumbel.

Still, the levels of glucagon in our American test subjects, right across the board in all ethnicities and economic classes, were so high that there was no denying that the sugar-level boosting hormone was the defining chemical of American life.

Our bafflement continued for some time. We considered many possibilities, from the simplistic (America has a sweet tooth? How do you get from that to Iraq?) to the outlandish (America puts a sugar-coating on human violence, makes it attractive and marketable?).

Luck—or synchronicity—finally provided the answer. Our core researchers were sitting around brainstorming one day when a programmer strolled past with his Walkman turned up very loud. I heard a faint but familiar voice. I grabbed the programmer and said, "What’s that tape?"

He said, "It’s the old Janis Joplin record. You know the one, uh, what was it called?"

As a group, the core researchers looked at each other and, as a group, we all shouted, "Cheap Thrills!"

That was it. Glucagon. Sugar. The fast, easy, cheap, repeatable high. The swift kick. Which of course produces finally a culture notable mainly for its short attention span, its love of surface effect. From Steven Spielberg to Moby-Dick, from the carelessly carefree lines of Walt Whitman to the quickie slaps in the face of Emily Dickinson, from the finely wrought messes of Jackson Pollock to the high, anonymous art of that highest American art, the TV commercial, from the slapdash silkscreens of Andy Warhol to the effortless fast dunk of Michael Jordan. There it was: glucagon and the American quest for fast, cheap thrills.