Edit: I’ve changed my original post a bit because I couldn’t tell if it came across as aggressive and I was starting to really obsess about it.
I’m… kinda puzzled by the questions and the situation described by this post. It seems it’s missing a couple points that are a relevant part of the whole picture. These points are also extremely relevant in the motivations of those who support differently “local conservatives” and “foreign populations that try to defend their cultures” and in most reasoned objections to the spread of “universal ideology” (I’ve also met a large number of stupid objections that argue against it for worse reasons). My position is one of support for the spread of some of the elements of this “universal ideology” and of opposition to the spread of others.
The clear distinctions you can make between Australian Aborigines, Tibetans, Native Americans on a side, and rural British and “American Rednecks” on the other is that in the first group there’s a foreign culture that’s also overwhelming in power that has come to their home and is erasing both their culture and their properties/territories/wellbeing in general. Their cultural erasure it’s also going step by step with an exploitation from the power that’s attempting to erase their culture. In the second group… not at all. Rural British and American Rednecks aren’t certainly seeing their resources appropriated by the powers behind the immigrants. It is only their culture that’s under “siege” and it’s a different kind of siege involving no laws or planned attempts to erase their cultural ways, the attack comes from mere exposure to different ideas and customs. So yeah, it makes perfect sense to sympathise with Tibetans trying to shield what’s left of their culture and not with British trying to do the same, especially since the attempts that elicit different reactions are usually very different in nature. It would take a special kind of fanatic to go bother British trying to have a traditional warm pint of beer with shepherd pies in their pubs (I apologise with any British reading this for stereotyping and not bothering go search a cherished British tradition) because “sushi is better, you uncultured simpletons”. Usually you contest British for trying to defend their culture in ways that make other people miserable or will break a lot of stuff, such as banning immigrations or exiting UE. If Tibetans started throwing rocks and making racist signs against poor North Korean immigrants who are escaping from the persecutions of dictatorships and trying to make a new life for themselves, well support would evaporate fast.
I think the idea of Western Culture that needs to be defended from barbarism often seems to be actually talking about the universal rights, a reasoned attempts to understand what rights every human should be granted. (There is some opposition about Western Culture choosing universal rights for everyone, but most objections to universal rights I’ve heard seem to melt under the base kind of pragmatism that’s required to allow Zeno of Elea to not starve before reaching his kitchen, it just takes starting to think concrete stuff like “okay, then are you okay with being eye-gouged if the other guy’s culture insist it’s really necessary?”). The current set of universal rights fits the Noahide Laws example in spade, they’re awesomely tolerant of everything that don’t involve oppressing people and atrocities and, if applied correctly, would take a lot of fanatism out of the fight for transgender bathrooms. People don’t get that pissed off about the bathrooms, people get really pissed off because of a myriad of bigger and smaller things that oppress category x and then every fight for category x right becomes a crusade for some of them. It would be really hard to get that heated about the bathroom issue by itself, I think. Sadly, coca cola seems to be more competitive than universal rights if things are left to take their course, so we might want to give universal rights a hand there.
I’d also point out that a lot of the “fair fights” that universal culture and colonialism picked were more about bombing the other guys to hell and/or setting up a local corrupt, bloodthirsty dictatorship/protectorate/whatever from which to “buy” their resources for pennies than saying who would win between the Dreamtime and sushi restaurants in a free market fight. It’s a bit weird to say that western/universal culture wins fair fights when it has mostly been exported by weapon superiority. Most of the places where universal culture is replacing their own were first torn apart to exploit the hell out of them. If this war of cultures was an experiment, I’d say this was a hell of a confounder.
I guess that what I’m trying to say is that, if you try to take a step back and look at what’s happening on the whole, the situation goes back to be… not so complicated, at least about the goals we can pick. We can go big in support of universal rights and of attempts to preserve individual cultures that don’t involve deeply problematic strategies. We also go big against large countries invading and exploiting the hell out of small ones and cancelling their culture as they do. Then we can see what problems are actually left after this approach and deal with them.
In the second group… not at all. Rural British and American Rednecks aren’t certainly seeing their resources appropriated by the powers behind the immigrants.
A common complaint about immigration is “they’re taking our jobs.” For a group whose primary asset is their ability to do labor, this seems pretty fair to characterize as “our resources are being appropriated,” and it’s easy to notice that many billionaires who are made better off by mass immigration support decreasing regulatory barriers to immigration.
[Of course, open borders seem like a good idea to economists, and billionaires are more likely to have economist-approved views on economic policy, so I don’t think this is just a ‘self-interest’ story; I just think it’s worth noticing that the same “disenfranchised group having their resources appropriated” story does in fact go through for those groups.]
Most of the places where universal culture is replacing their own were first thorn apart to exploit the hell out of them.
I feel like this is missing the core point of the article, which is that the “colonizer / colonized” narrative misses the transition from the ‘traditional cultures’ of Britain and America to universal culture. Why did universalism win in Britain and America? If it was because those places were torn apart in order to exploit the hell out of them, then the flavor of this analysis changes significantly.
A common complaint about immigration is “they’re taking our jobs.” For a group whose primary asset is their ability to do labor, this seems pretty fair to characterize as “our resources are being appropriated,” and it’s easy to notice that many billionaires who are made better off by mass immigration support decreasing regulatory barriers to immigration.
[Of course, open borders seem like a good idea to economists, and billionaires are more likely to have economist-approved views on economic policy, so I don’t think this is just a ‘self-interest’ story; I just think it’s worth noticing that the same “disenfranchised group having their resources appropriated” story does in fact go through for those groups.]
Sorry, I guess I could have explained this part more clearly. I agree that the Rural Brits and American Reds like-groups often believe in a narrative about some external power attacking and erasing them (the evil EU ruling council, billionaires engaged in philanthropy, etc...). My point was that the difference in sympathy these group receive from a third party is best explained:
1) by the belief of this third party in the existence of this external power. Most people criticising these groups would believe in China’s violations of human rights but not in evil billionaires controlling the choice on immigration policies.
2) by the strategy these people adopt in defending their culture. If the Tibetan started harassing refugees from a war thorn country I would sympathise with them less than I sympathise with their current attempts to defend their traditions by just practicing them.
I feel like this is missing the core point of the article, which is that the “colonizer / colonized” narrative misses the transition from the ‘traditional cultures’ of Britain and America to universal culture. Why did universalism win in Britain and America? If it was because those places were torn apart in order to exploit the hell out of them, then the flavor of this analysis changes significantly.
First, I think a lot of the universal culture is actually straight from the “traditional cultures” of Britain and America, it’s just harder to see it as something not universal since we grew up in it. Often I feel a cultural barrier that gets in the way of the conversation when I’m discussing certain subjects with Americans on this site, and I’m from Italy, so still in the western culture myself. It is however a complex subject and debating exactly which is what would be pretty hard.
I also think it’s not clear what is considered “traditional cultures” of these places, if we are talking about their cultural traditions from before industrialisation… then those were changed in those place to better fit the requirements industrialisation had. Other western countries started to industrialise as fast as they could because the first ones who did it were starting to gain a military-economical supremacy over them.
Non-western countries weren’t fast enough to adapt or didn’t had enough weapons to stave off who did, so they were colonised, invaded and etc until they either managed to build up an industry and a military or were torn apart to exploit them.
I’m of course generalising a bit, but I think that 90% of this “culture war” was actually a war of might. Industrialisation gives you an edge that everyone wants, so everyone either tries to copy it or is invaded and exploited until they do it anyway.
If nations didn’t have to compete for domination and freedom, I think a lot of them would have picked just some bits of the “universal culture” rather than the whole package, either for inertia or because some bits you can just left out and your population would be better off. (I guess whether that would have been better or worse would require calculating a lot of deaths and of changes in quality of life. A lot of the costs will hit us in the face in the next years if they aren’t prevented, so the question would still be left open anyway).
The bits that these nations would usually pick would be “universal culture” that fits the description suggested in the post, since they would be practices that win over other in a fair fight for culture. But the main driving factor for the expansions of these norms was the increased military and economical effectiveness that came with industrialisation, so we can’t really call Coca Cola an universal winner because we have no idea of how things would have gone in a cultural fight, we just mainly saw a military and economical one.
Human rights and democracy do seem like these cultural universal winners, I gave it some thoughts and realised that yeah, a lot of places seem to have people in it who kinda buy this whole “not being exploited by our local feudal overlords” once they hear the concept. Unfortunately, Coca Cola itself and other… competitive spreaders had a few words against it in a lot of these places.
Also, other cultural practices have expanded peacefully in western countries, but usually they are just exported in other countries as part of the whole industrialisation package, so it would be hard to name them as universal winners.
There’s also the whole subject of mass medias of communications, which I think are pretty effective at overwhelming any kind of culture with new content. I do hope that nazism and fascism aren’t universal winners, and that they managed to take over Germany and Italy because they had just found a way to be louder than anyone else for a while. The same thing can happen with McDonald or action movies or whatever.
This is a really tangled subject, so I guess I was a bit a lot harsh in my comment, but missing those points I mentioned was a rather biased way to look at it.
To summarise, I guess I understood the main idea of the article, and I’m interested in how exactly reality could be shaped to maximise the benefits of “true cultural universal winners” without erasing the parts of local culture that don’t make people miserable.
But I think the post didn’t managed to carve reality at the right joints and confounded different kind of victories.
It is only their culture that’s under “siege” and it’s a different kind of siege involving no laws or planned attempts to erase their cultural ways...
A redneck has seen gay marriage legalised in his lifetime, while homosexuality is still illegal in 71 countries. Islam seems to get a lot more leniency on this topic, compared to Christianity.
Rural British and American Rednecks aren’t certainly seeing their resources appropriated by the powers behind the immigrants.
If I remember my history correctly, the Industrial Revolution didn’t go so smoothly for the Rural Brits either.
And from a certain point of view (Marx, mainly) a redneck is exploited by the same people pillaging the resources of Burkina Faso (and everywhere else).
Whatever one’s opinion on capitalism, seeing the claim that small countries are exploited for resources, while rednecks are not, is bizarre to me.
Not just Islam. It was illegal in India 3 years back. Also, Christian majority Barbados, Antigua, Camroon, Burundi, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Namibia and a few other African countries ban homosexuality.
I never said it was just Islam.
But you are right—it is not Christians, but rather white people, that are held to a higher standard in this regard (at least by USA liberals).
Edit: I’ve changed my original post a bit because I couldn’t tell if it came across as aggressive and I was starting to really obsess about it.
I’m… kinda puzzled by the questions and the situation described by this post. It seems it’s missing a couple points that are a relevant part of the whole picture. These points are also extremely relevant in the motivations of those who support differently “local conservatives” and “foreign populations that try to defend their cultures” and in most reasoned objections to the spread of “universal ideology” (I’ve also met a large number of stupid objections that argue against it for worse reasons). My position is one of support for the spread of some of the elements of this “universal ideology” and of opposition to the spread of others.
The clear distinctions you can make between Australian Aborigines, Tibetans, Native Americans on a side, and rural British and “American Rednecks” on the other is that in the first group there’s a foreign culture that’s also overwhelming in power that has come to their home and is erasing both their culture and their properties/territories/wellbeing in general. Their cultural erasure it’s also going step by step with an exploitation from the power that’s attempting to erase their culture. In the second group… not at all. Rural British and American Rednecks aren’t certainly seeing their resources appropriated by the powers behind the immigrants. It is only their culture that’s under “siege” and it’s a different kind of siege involving no laws or planned attempts to erase their cultural ways, the attack comes from mere exposure to different ideas and customs. So yeah, it makes perfect sense to sympathise with Tibetans trying to shield what’s left of their culture and not with British trying to do the same, especially since the attempts that elicit different reactions are usually very different in nature. It would take a special kind of fanatic to go bother British trying to have a traditional warm pint of beer with shepherd pies in their pubs (I apologise with any British reading this for stereotyping and not bothering go search a cherished British tradition) because “sushi is better, you uncultured simpletons”. Usually you contest British for trying to defend their culture in ways that make other people miserable or will break a lot of stuff, such as banning immigrations or exiting UE. If Tibetans started throwing rocks and making racist signs against poor North Korean immigrants who are escaping from the persecutions of dictatorships and trying to make a new life for themselves, well support would evaporate fast.
I think the idea of Western Culture that needs to be defended from barbarism often seems to be actually talking about the universal rights, a reasoned attempts to understand what rights every human should be granted. (There is some opposition about Western Culture choosing universal rights for everyone, but most objections to universal rights I’ve heard seem to melt under the base kind of pragmatism that’s required to allow Zeno of Elea to not starve before reaching his kitchen, it just takes starting to think concrete stuff like “okay, then are you okay with being eye-gouged if the other guy’s culture insist it’s really necessary?”). The current set of universal rights fits the Noahide Laws example in spade, they’re awesomely tolerant of everything that don’t involve oppressing people and atrocities and, if applied correctly, would take a lot of fanatism out of the fight for transgender bathrooms. People don’t get that pissed off about the bathrooms, people get really pissed off because of a myriad of bigger and smaller things that oppress category x and then every fight for category x right becomes a crusade for some of them. It would be really hard to get that heated about the bathroom issue by itself, I think. Sadly, coca cola seems to be more competitive than universal rights if things are left to take their course, so we might want to give universal rights a hand there.
I’d also point out that a lot of the “fair fights” that universal culture and colonialism picked were more about bombing the other guys to hell and/or setting up a local corrupt, bloodthirsty dictatorship/protectorate/whatever from which to “buy” their resources for pennies than saying who would win between the Dreamtime and sushi restaurants in a free market fight. It’s a bit weird to say that western/universal culture wins fair fights when it has mostly been exported by weapon superiority. Most of the places where universal culture is replacing their own were first torn apart to exploit the hell out of them. If this war of cultures was an experiment, I’d say this was a hell of a confounder.
I guess that what I’m trying to say is that, if you try to take a step back and look at what’s happening on the whole, the situation goes back to be… not so complicated, at least about the goals we can pick. We can go big in support of universal rights and of attempts to preserve individual cultures that don’t involve deeply problematic strategies. We also go big against large countries invading and exploiting the hell out of small ones and cancelling their culture as they do. Then we can see what problems are actually left after this approach and deal with them.
A common complaint about immigration is “they’re taking our jobs.” For a group whose primary asset is their ability to do labor, this seems pretty fair to characterize as “our resources are being appropriated,” and it’s easy to notice that many billionaires who are made better off by mass immigration support decreasing regulatory barriers to immigration.
[Of course, open borders seem like a good idea to economists, and billionaires are more likely to have economist-approved views on economic policy, so I don’t think this is just a ‘self-interest’ story; I just think it’s worth noticing that the same “disenfranchised group having their resources appropriated” story does in fact go through for those groups.]
I feel like this is missing the core point of the article, which is that the “colonizer / colonized” narrative misses the transition from the ‘traditional cultures’ of Britain and America to universal culture. Why did universalism win in Britain and America? If it was because those places were torn apart in order to exploit the hell out of them, then the flavor of this analysis changes significantly.
Sorry, I guess I could have explained this part more clearly. I agree that the Rural Brits and American Reds like-groups often believe in a narrative about some external power attacking and erasing them (the evil EU ruling council, billionaires engaged in philanthropy, etc...). My point was that the difference in sympathy these group receive from a third party is best explained:
1) by the belief of this third party in the existence of this external power. Most people criticising these groups would believe in China’s violations of human rights but not in evil billionaires controlling the choice on immigration policies.
2) by the strategy these people adopt in defending their culture. If the Tibetan started harassing refugees from a war thorn country I would sympathise with them less than I sympathise with their current attempts to defend their traditions by just practicing them.
First, I think a lot of the universal culture is actually straight from the “traditional cultures” of Britain and America, it’s just harder to see it as something not universal since we grew up in it. Often I feel a cultural barrier that gets in the way of the conversation when I’m discussing certain subjects with Americans on this site, and I’m from Italy, so still in the western culture myself. It is however a complex subject and debating exactly which is what would be pretty hard.
I also think it’s not clear what is considered “traditional cultures” of these places, if we are talking about their cultural traditions from before industrialisation… then those were changed in those place to better fit the requirements industrialisation had. Other western countries started to industrialise as fast as they could because the first ones who did it were starting to gain a military-economical supremacy over them.
Non-western countries weren’t fast enough to adapt or didn’t had enough weapons to stave off who did, so they were colonised, invaded and etc until they either managed to build up an industry and a military or were torn apart to exploit them.
I’m of course generalising a bit, but I think that 90% of this “culture war” was actually a war of might. Industrialisation gives you an edge that everyone wants, so everyone either tries to copy it or is invaded and exploited until they do it anyway.
If nations didn’t have to compete for domination and freedom, I think a lot of them would have picked just some bits of the “universal culture” rather than the whole package, either for inertia or because some bits you can just left out and your population would be better off. (I guess whether that would have been better or worse would require calculating a lot of deaths and of changes in quality of life. A lot of the costs will hit us in the face in the next years if they aren’t prevented, so the question would still be left open anyway).
The bits that these nations would usually pick would be “universal culture” that fits the description suggested in the post, since they would be practices that win over other in a fair fight for culture. But the main driving factor for the expansions of these norms was the increased military and economical effectiveness that came with industrialisation, so we can’t really call Coca Cola an universal winner because we have no idea of how things would have gone in a cultural fight, we just mainly saw a military and economical one.
Human rights and democracy do seem like these cultural universal winners, I gave it some thoughts and realised that yeah, a lot of places seem to have people in it who kinda buy this whole “not being exploited by our local feudal overlords” once they hear the concept. Unfortunately, Coca Cola itself and other… competitive spreaders had a few words against it in a lot of these places.
Also, other cultural practices have expanded peacefully in western countries, but usually they are just exported in other countries as part of the whole industrialisation package, so it would be hard to name them as universal winners.
There’s also the whole subject of mass medias of communications, which I think are pretty effective at overwhelming any kind of culture with new content. I do hope that nazism and fascism aren’t universal winners, and that they managed to take over Germany and Italy because they had just found a way to be louder than anyone else for a while. The same thing can happen with McDonald or action movies or whatever.
This is a really tangled subject, so I guess I was
a bita lot harsh in my comment, but missing those points I mentioned was a rather biased way to look at it.To summarise, I guess I understood the main idea of the article, and I’m interested in how exactly reality could be shaped to maximise the benefits of “true cultural universal winners” without erasing the parts of local culture that don’t make people miserable.
But I think the post didn’t managed to carve reality at the right joints and confounded different kind of victories.
A redneck has seen gay marriage legalised in his lifetime, while homosexuality is still illegal in 71 countries. Islam seems to get a lot more leniency on this topic, compared to Christianity.
If I remember my history correctly, the Industrial Revolution didn’t go so smoothly for the Rural Brits either.
And from a certain point of view (Marx, mainly) a redneck is exploited by the same people pillaging the resources of Burkina Faso (and everywhere else).
Whatever one’s opinion on capitalism, seeing the claim that small countries are exploited for resources, while rednecks are not, is bizarre to me.
Not just Islam. It was illegal in India 3 years back. Also, Christian majority Barbados, Antigua, Camroon, Burundi, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Namibia and a few other African countries ban homosexuality.
I never said it was just Islam. But you are right—it is not Christians, but rather white people, that are held to a higher standard in this regard (at least by USA liberals).