Nationalism and Culture

[Nachtswalbe]

This thread is for discussion about nationalism, culture wars and the intersection of politics and culture, to match the capitalism/socialism etc. thread

Some people I know not only push for a world government, but also a world culture to match.
Scott Siskind argued it is already occurring: (CW: longwinded, rationalist) https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/07/25/h ... t-was-won/

TLDR: the most successful products comprise “universal culture” and it is the main driver of progress, unlike reactionary local cultures.

I personally believe a world government with borders centered around economic and geographic regions, and ethnicity explicitly decoupled from administration in all senses.
I personally believe that to achieve proper secularism, Christmas and the like should not be public holidays - there should be 4 small breaks centered around the solistices and equinoxes instead of "winter break" or "summer break" as both a more rational and secular

[bradrn]

https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/07/25/h ... t-was-won/

I don’t think this article is pushing for a world culture at all. He spends a whole third of it presenting arguments why it might be a bad idea! (And by the way, he prefers to go by the name Scott Alexander.)

[Nachtswalbe]

https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/07/25/h ... t-was-won/

I don’t think this article is pushing for a world culture at all. He spends a whole third of it presenting arguments why it might be a bad idea! (And by the way, he prefers to go by the name Scott Alexander.)

Point taken - although he does take it as some sort of overcoming hegemonic force. Also I will refer to him as Scott Alexander for courtesy's sake.

[Nachtswalbe]

Back on topic, is there a formula-based way to measure how much a culture converges from, diverges from and borrows from neighboring and distant cultures, quantifiable through units?

[Nachtswalbe]

Also, I will refrain from - and I advise others to do likewise, to refrain from bringing in non-academic commentary on culture, since culture wars are widely discussed topic among non-academic writers and I do not wish to have every third post be JoeThePundit's opinion on something

[Ares Land]

The very premise of the article is shaky, to say the least. I don't think there's such a thing as Western culture to begin with.

To take a simple example: France and the US are both unequivocally Western; both countries have distinct cultural norms. There is a certain amount of common ground and enough familiarity with each other's cultures on both sides so that no one experiences serious culture shock, but the differences are there.

It's not superficial either. Regularly going to church is, at best, an eccentric choice here in France. There's a widespread perception that religion is somehow a suspicious thing. Contrast this to the American situation where we can, I believe, assume most people are religious in some way. If religion isn't fundamental to culture, then what is?
The list could go on. I'm not married to my partner (and she's the mother of my kids); unexceptional here, but Americans have found the idea pretty baffling. By contrast, the American idea of dating feels weird and formal to us.

On the original question -- I don't think monocultures are healthy. Having distinct, different, healthy cultures is a good thing overall.

One trick of authoritarian (I'm looking at Russia and China here!) is to claim that criticising the regime is unacceptable American cultural ingerence. I believe these claims can be dismissed out of hand. Ethics can be surprisingly universal. No culture has ever required that the rulers be unaccountable tyrants. (Or you know, let's take the CCP's claims at their face values. That amounts to saying that somehow Xi Jinping is the model of the ideal Confucian ruler -- that's a cruel joke.)
I'll bring up France again (sorry about that -- but it is a culture that lies conveniently at hand!): right-wingers here complain about feminist activism as an unsufferable American import (that's really insulting to the French intellectual tradition -- as if the idea that women are human beings was unprecedented here!)

[zompist]

This thread is for discussion about nationalism, culture wars and the intersection of politics and culture, to match the capitalism/socialism etc. thread

Some people I know not only push for a world government, but also a world culture to match.
Scott Siskind argued it is already occurring: (CW: longwinded, rationalist) https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/07/25/h ... t-was-won/

Interesting blog entries-- both Alexander's and Caplan's.

However, I think both are deeply flawed by taking it for granted that there are multiple "civilizations" with well defined boundaries, and one is doing much better than all the rest. Or to be more blunt: both are American dudes who have grown up in a world where the US is on top, like it that way, and never had to think hard about what things look like to non-Americans.

This is most clearly seen here:

People who complain about western culture taking over their country always manage to bring up Coca-Cola. But in what sense is Coca-Cola culturally western? It’s an Ethiopian bean mixed with a Colombian leaf mixed with carbonated water and lots and lots of sugar. An American was the first person to discover that this combination tasted really good – our technological/economic head start ensured that. But in a world where America never existed, eventually some Japanese or Arabian chemist would have found that sugar-filled fizzy drinks were really tasty. It was a discovery waiting to be plucked out of the void, like penicillin. America summoned it but did not create it. If western medicine is just medicine that works, soda pop is just refreshment that works. ... Coca-Cola spreads because it tastes better than whatever people were drinking before. ...If there was something that outcompeted Coca-Cola, then that would be the official soda of universal culture and Coca-Cola would be consigned to the scrapheap of history.

I mean, this is either incredibly naive, or disingenuous. One, Coca-Cola is a $37 billion corporation, one of the 30 companies that make up the Dow-Jones Industrial Average, also a member of the Standard & Poor 100. An American company, of course, not a Japanese or Arabian one; it obviously caters to American tastes, though it happens to have wider appeal. Coca-Cola spends $4 billion a year on marketing. It's not easy to compete with such a behemoth.

Two, it's absurd to claim that Coke "tastes better than whatever people were drinking before". People are obviously still drinking coffee, tea, and milk in enormous quantities. Coke outperforms Pepsi, but to think that it's objectively better because of that is simply to worship money: it should be obvious that which drink predominates is highly arbitrary, and subject to huge swings. (If you can successfully predict the next swing, you can make a billion dollars.)

I wonder if he's even aware of any national alternatives to Coca-Cola. In Brazil, for instance, I became fond of guarana. Guarana is a big business in Brazil. A Coke executive would be extremely foolish to think that Coke would obviously win because it "tastes better." In fact Coke does well in Brazil, but the company introduced a guarana soft drink of its own (Kuat).

On the one hand, universal culture is objectively better. Its science is more correct, its economy will grow faster, its soft drinks are more refreshing, its political systems are (necessarily) freer, and it is (in a certain specific sense) what everybody would select if given a free choice. It also seems morally better.

It's hard to understand why someone writes this kind of boosterism. He talks quite a lot about two Western practices that were very much not morally better than everyone else: slavery and colonialism. He is surely aware that many people, inside and outside the West, have severe moral criticisms of it; he's surely aware that not all of them can be attributed to "backwardness" or "non-rationality" or whatever he thinks resists "universal culture."

I understand that his thesis is that "universal culture", though it originated in and is still dominated by the West, is different from and superior to "Western culture". But when it comes to things like colonialism, it seems like a rhetorical technique to make everything he likes about the West "universal" and to dismiss the things he doesn't like as "Western".

His point about "freer" political systems is maybe not so well thought out. One, is he not even aware that for most of the last century, the West created and supported dictatorships, and preferred them to freer systems? Two, did China just disappear from his history books? I am no fan of its authoritarian system, but its massive and sustained growth makes nonsense of his claim that "universal culture" favors political freedom.

I do think he has some good points about e.g. medicine. But I think he overestimates how rational and bias-free Western science is. (As just one example, medical manuals are usually written assuming that the patient is white. This has a real effect on diagnosis of many conditions.)

Finally, I don't see that he's thought about how different the "Western/universal" gap is compared with, say, the "East Asian/universal" gap. Yes, we rejected a lot of the common ideas of the year 1600. But there is a cultural continuity, and even an institutional continuity, that doesn't exist that way elsewhere.

[bradrn]

It's hard to understand why someone writes this kind of boosterism. He talks quite a lot about two Western practices that were very much not morally better than everyone else: slavery and colonialism. He is surely aware that many people, inside and outside the West, have severe moral criticisms of it; he's surely aware that not all of them can be attributed to "backwardness" or "non-rationality" or whatever he thinks resists "universal culture."

I understand that his thesis is that "universal culture", though it originated in and is still dominated by the West, is different from and superior to "Western culture". But when it comes to things like colonialism, it seems like a rhetorical technique to make everything he likes about the West "universal" and to dismiss the things he doesn't like as "Western".

I get the impression this is a bit of a strawman. If you define ‘universal culture’ as ‘things that work in an industrialised society’, then both slavery and colonialism are by definition not part of this culture, insofar as they turned out to not work and were discarded. (A cynic might suggest that American South-style slavery halted because the same work could be done more easily by big machines. I’m not sure how true this speculation might be.)

I do think he has some good points about e.g. medicine. But I think he overestimates how rational and bias-free Western science is. (As just one example, medical manuals are usually written assuming that the patient is white. This has a real effect on diagnosis of many conditions.)

Alexander is a psychiatrist by trade, and regularly writes articles on adjacent issues. I am sure he knows about this.

Finally, I don't see that he's thought about how different the "Western/universal" gap is compared with, say, the "East Asian/universal" gap. Yes, we rejected a lot of the common ideas of the year 1600. But there is a cultural continuity, and even an institutional continuity, that doesn't exist that way elsewhere.

I agree this is valid criticism. Some possibilities:

1. Universal culture has penetrated further into Western society than others, so it hasn’t yet picked up as many non-Western influences as it could
2. Universal culture is conflated with Western culture, and we overestimate the amount of continuity between them

[zompist]

I understand that his thesis is that "universal culture", though it originated in and is still dominated by the West, is different from and superior to "Western culture". But when it comes to things like colonialism, it seems like a rhetorical technique to make everything he likes about the West "universal" and to dismiss the things he doesn't like as "Western".

I get the impression this is a bit of a strawman. If you define ‘universal culture’ as ‘things that work in an industrialised society’, then both slavery and colonialism are by definition not part of this culture, insofar as they turned out to not work and were discarded.

Was 1960 not an industrialized society? Colonialism lasted that long; longer in some areas. The US South was certainly industrialized in the 1960s when it was still preventing Blacks from voting or attending white universities.

I think anyone from a recently decolonized country would find it ridiculous and rather offensive for Westerners to describe colonialism as "discarded". Not only was it in operation in living memory, its effects are still dominant in the world.

Imagine what a person in China would think about this essay. Really: the Opium Wars, the unequal treaties, the foreign occupation of Beijing, foreign mismanagement and terrible ideas, then a near-conquest of the country by what used to be a minor local state, replacement of the entire educational system, replacement of the entire political system... all this is supposed to be the wonderful embrace of Universal Civilization?

To an American, history has mostly been a benign march of progress leading to a world that frankly looks a lot more like home than ever. For much of the world, it was incredible trauma, and I don't think they'd be impressed with a theory that all the bad stuff is in the past.

[bradrn]

I understand that his thesis is that "universal culture", though it originated in and is still dominated by the West, is different from and superior to "Western culture". But when it comes to things like colonialism, it seems like a rhetorical technique to make everything he likes about the West "universal" and to dismiss the things he doesn't like as "Western".

I get the impression this is a bit of a strawman. If you define ‘universal culture’ as ‘things that work in an industrialised society’, then both slavery and colonialism are by definition not part of this culture, insofar as they turned out to not work and were discarded.

Was 1960 not an industrialized society? Colonialism lasted that long; longer in some areas. The US South was certainly industrialized in the 1960s when it was still preventing Blacks from voting or attending white universities.

I think anyone from a recently decolonized country would find it ridiculous and rather offensive for Westerners to describe colonialism as "discarded". Not only was it in operation in living memory, its effects are still dominant in the world.

I never said it was discarded quickly. Alas, society takes a long time to improve, and colonialism and slavery are certainly examples of this. But we did, eventually, come to a general agreement that they should be discarded.

Imagine what a person in China would think about this essay. Really: the Opium Wars, the unequal treaties, the foreign occupation of Beijing, foreign mismanagement and terrible ideas, then a near-conquest of the country by what used to be a minor local state, replacement of the entire educational system, replacement of the entire political system... all this is supposed to be the wonderful embrace of Universal Civilization?

To an American, history has mostly been a benign march of progress leading to a world that frankly looks a lot more like home than ever. For much of the world, it was incredible trauma, and I don't think they'd be impressed with a theory that all the bad stuff is in the past.

I don’t know all that much about either Chinese or American history (most history, in fact), so I can’t really comment about this. But I’m not sure that Alexander would describe China’s political system as anything close to that of Universal Culture: for one thing, it’s not democratic. I think the prediction he makes is that, eventually, it will assimilate to Universal Culture in its political system as well. (i.e. democracy, egalitarian gender roles, probably others I’ve forgotten as well. In a way, this reminds me to some extent of the idea of Whig history, except less black-or-white.)

[Moose-tache]

People who complain about western culture taking over their country always manage to bring up Coca-Cola. But in what sense is Coca-Cola culturally western? It’s an Ethiopian bean mixed with a Colombian leaf mixed with carbonated water and lots and lots of sugar. An American was the first person to discover that this combination tasted really good – our technological/economic head start ensured that. But in a world where America never existed, eventually some Japanese or Arabian chemist would have found that sugar-filled fizzy drinks were really tasty. It was a discovery waiting to be plucked out of the void, like penicillin. America summoned it but did not create it. If western medicine is just medicine that works, soda pop is just refreshment that works. ... Coca-Cola spreads because it tastes better than whatever people were drinking before. ...If there was something that outcompeted Coca-Cola, then that would be the official soda of universal culture and Coca-Cola would be consigned to the scrapheap of history.

I mean, this is either incredibly naive, or disingenuous. One, Coca-Cola is a $37 billion corporation, one of the 30 companies that make up the Dow-Jones Industrial Average, also a member of the Standard & Poor 100. An American company, of course, not a Japanese or Arabian one; it obviously caters to American tastes, though it happens to have wider appeal. Coca-Cola spends $4 billion a year on marketing. It's not easy to compete with such a behemoth.

Two, it's absurd to claim that Coke "tastes better than whatever people were drinking before". People are obviously still drinking coffee, tea, and milk in enormous quantities. Coke outperforms Pepsi, but to think that it's objectively better because of that is simply to worship money: it should be obvious that which drink predominates is highly arbitrary, and subject to huge swings. (If you can successfully predict the next swing, you can make a billion dollars.)

I wonder if he's even aware of any national alternatives to Coca-Cola. In Brazil, for instance, I became fond of guarana. Guarana is a big business in Brazil. A Coke executive would be extremely foolish to think that Coke would obviously win because it "tastes better." In fact Coke does well in Brazil, but the company introduced a guarana soft drink of its own (Kuat).

I agree that the example about Coca-Cola being some sort of objectively perfect drink is ignorant horse malarky. However, this does raise an interesting question. What’s relevant about Coca-Cola here is that it is made from ingredients from around the world, produced at an efficiency only possible due to mass industrialization, and marketed through a network of globalized, free-trade-friendly economies. The United States, for the last century or so, has been in a great position to pioneer or exploit those things, and so it’s Coca-Cola that is globally dominant rather than, say, popular Japanese soft drink Ramune (which according to Wikipedia is actually two years older than Coca-Cola). But the larger question is still valid. If Japan had taken over world trade and culture as aggressively as the Americans, would people in traditional societies be lamenting the inescapability of sugary Japanese soft drinks? In other words, when we complain about American imperialism, are we complaining about something inherent to America, or are we essentially complaining that America happened to be in a position to exert itself instead of other countries? To put it another way, the first step may be the one that made you lose your balance, but how do you know every step wasn’t slippery, and you just stepped on the first one first? You could be blaming a specific step, when the real problem is just steps in general. To me, this is an important question, because people often like to spin tales about how Western imperialism is the result of the moral deficiencies of the people living in those areas, and I find that hard to swallow.

Another example would be architecture. I had to listen to a Zoomer the other day complain that Western architecture is "so phallic. Just look at sky scrapers!" I would love, LOVE, to see how she thinks a team of Somali or Guyanan architects would build something that has to cram 4 million square feet onto a 40k square foot lot without making something that's taller than it is wide, apparently the only criterion a building must meet to be labeled "phallic" if it is built to a Western tradition. So often we complain about "Western" things that really are inescapable products of industrialization, or global trade, or Capitalist class hierarchy, things that are no kinder or gentler when done by non-Western people. The ire we should have at those things is then redirected, and a bunch of well-meaning people can convince themselves that they're not part of the problem because they do reiki healing and eat galangal at every meal, all the while doing nothing to address the actual problems that are not tied to Western culture.

[Nachtswalbe]

This reminds me of a timeline by ruth set in MITHC a generation later, where the Japanese Empire has politically loosened its grip on its clients, but still promotes Japanese emigration and Japanization of its clients to the extent of eventually overshadowing English in the Pacific States. Like certain countries IOTL, the Empire promotes its Sphere as saving Asia and the PacRim from falling to nazism and fascism

Like some Imperial functionary figured there’s no way we could really assimilate unless North Beach became Kitahama, and Vista Grande became Taikei, and Futayama, and Kinmonbashi.

[Nachtswalbe]

Hypotheticals aside, Western* cultures are so dominant that 70% of the world uses the Latin Alphabet to write their native languages.

*Classifying America, Russia, Europe, Australasia, Latin America as collectively Western
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/ ... on.svg.png
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/ ... on.svg.png

[zompist]

If Japan had taken over world trade and culture as aggressively as the Americans, would people in traditional societies be lamenting the inescapability of sugary Japanese soft drinks? In other words, when we complain about American imperialism, are we complaining about something inherent to America, or are we essentially complaining that America happened to be in a position to exert itself instead of other countries? [...] To me, this is an important question, because people often like to spin tales about how Western imperialism is the result of the moral deficiencies of the people living in those areas, and I find that hard to swallow.

Yeah, this is a failing of the left: thinking that the only real moral villains are the Western ruling class. Usually it's harmless, because if you're totally focused on problems in Western society-- and many a non-Western society-- the villains are the Western ruling class. But it can be seriously distorting when people look at other countries. (I recently read a review of a conference on the Left and China, which was appalling. They apparently take Xi Jinping as a fervent Maoist, accept the bonkers proposition that the PRC is socialist, and absolve it of any blame for anything.)

We actually saw what Japanese imperialism was like, and it was horrible.

So often we complain about "Western" things that really are inescapable products of industrialization, or global trade, or Capitalist class hierarchy, things that are no kinder or gentler when done by non-Western people.

It bugs me when people attribute to "capitalism" problems caused simply by density.

[Nachtswalbe]

Sometimes, local elites will get rid of their own people's cultural traditions on the basis that foreign (e.g Western) traditions are superior.
Wikipedia on Turkish music:

Tekelioğlu has argued that a major reason of this censorship is the republican elites' unwavering belief in absolute truths and a unified notion of "civilization", in which the technologically advanced West were superior in all of their traditions, including that of music, which in turn justified the policy "for the people's sake".[3]

Mao Zedong even wanted China to write using Pinyin only, although that was later dropped.
However, I have never heard (outside of the Israeli case), the leadership of an independent sovereign state switching to speaking a non-native language and then requiring/aggressively promoting it as the sole national language.

Perhaps in a world where English was less dominant due to a smaller British Empire due to different events in the 18th and 19th centuries, we could see modernizers adopt *Esperanto as their national language

[Ares Land]

If Japan had taken over world trade and culture as aggressively as the Americans, would people in traditional societies be lamenting the inescapability of sugary Japanese soft drinks?

Data point: anime and manga did spread far and wide. You don't have to look very far to find someone lamenting this fact.

Another example would be architecture. I had to listen to a Zoomer the other day complain that Western architecture is "so phallic. Just look at sky scrapers!" I would love, LOVE, to see how she thinks a team of Somali or Guyanan architects would build something that has to cram 4 million square feet onto a 40k square foot lot without making something that's taller than it is wide, apparently the only criterion a building must meet to be labeled "phallic" if it is built to a Western tradition. So often we complain about "Western" things that really are inescapable products of industrialization, or global trade, or Capitalist class hierarchy, things that are no kinder or gentler when done by non-Western people. The ire we should have at those things is then redirected, and a bunch of well-meaning people can convince themselves that they're not part of the problem because they do reiki healing and eat galangal at every meal, all the while doing nothing to address the actual problems that are not tied to Western culture.

I don't think skyscrapers are particularly phallic. If that guy's phallus looks like 432 Park Avenue, maybe he should check with a urologist.

That said, yeah, skyscrapers don't necessarily follow from urban density (Cramming 6 or 7-story building closely together will get you even better results.) so they are imitations of a particular architectural model. (Then again, the urge to build high is not particularly western!)

[Rounin Ryuuji]

If Japan had taken over world trade and culture as aggressively as the Americans, would people in traditional societies be lamenting the inescapability of sugary Japanese soft drinks?

Data point: anime and manga did spread far and wide. You don't have to look very far to find someone lamenting this fact.

I find the idea of lamenting it... odd... but then again, I associate Japanese things with a vague sense of nostalgia, probably because I grew up at a time when they were seeping in culturally, but without being cognizant that they were somehow "foreign".

[hwhatting]

Data point: anime and manga did spread far and wide. You don't have to look very far to find someone lamenting this fact.

I find the idea of lamenting it... odd... but then again, I associate Japanese things with a vague sense of nostalgia, probably because I grew up at a time when they were seeping in culturally, but without being cognizant that they were somehow "foreign".

I still remember times back in 70s Germany when comics were seen by some as a dangerous American import rotting the brains of children who read them instead of a good book. That type of prejudice was held only by old fogeys by then (after all, comics were around at least since WW II), while the belief that comics were only for children held out for longer. For the people who hold that kind of prejudice, mangas are just a different kind of brain rotter.

[Ares Land]

I'm told this is a problem in, of all places, comic book publishers. Publishing houses here are conservative on that respect, to the point of absurdity, and object to new work that seems to be too influenced by manga.

[hwhatting]

I'm told this is a problem in, of all places, comic book publishers. Publishing houses here are conservative on that respect, to the point of absurdity, and object to new work that seems to be too influenced by manga.

I guess that's because you have much more of an own comics culture in France than Germany has. It's not as if we don't have a comics scene or some (locally) famous authors / artists, but I'd assume that locally produced comics are much less of overall sales than in France. So here, it's just one kind of import or another.