People talk about how the strength of the US is from its "diversity", but this is just another one of those silly "war is peace" kind of comments. The truth is that the strength of the US is in its unity, and that unity is accomplished despite its diversity.
Your attempt to belittle those silly "war is peace" kind of comments is plainly silly because it fails to explain why what you say is the truth, is the truth. It falls flat on its face because it ignores the cultural ‘bias’, which in this case is ‘tolerance’, the force multiplier of contemporary society as we would like to imagine it, unless we’re just pretending. Without it, Diversity and Unity are meaningless incongruities, as is evident from your post.
W.H. Auden, poet, describes civilization as “the degree to which diversity is attained, unity retained”. Perhaps this conveys a better sense of what I am trying to say.
The US culture is so attractive that people come here despite near certain knowledge that their mother tongue will die out no later than their grandchildren. That means that the sweet things their own mothers whispered to them, as babies, will not be repeated by their children's children.
The reason for this is that people find that ‘values’ are more important than ‘culture’. This is a tricky nuance, imo a diversity of values leads to a culture of chaos, and vice versa, and this is the perennial fight.
The death of a culture is a difficult and emotional thing, and the strength of US culture is that it is so strong that it can overcome the emotional barrier.
with all due respect Bilow, if you’ll allow me the pleasure of doing this just once
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Just because there is a lot of bad analysis out there, doesn’t mean you should feel compelled to be contribute. Jesus Weeps LOL !!!!!!!!
Culture is not so easy to destroy, look what happened after the Taliban blew up the buddhas, a bad omen if ever there was one. Not to diminish it, but there’s a little more than emotion at stake - it takes a lot of juice to move those two statu(t)es around and the idea you put forward here is no more than a useless artifact of rationalism.
Turning to the spread of american culture through the world - it seems too easy to confuse the concentration of capital and clever marketing with the death of culture.
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A movement of the commons towards materialism, is often interpreted as a homogenization of culture, but I propose that the opposite is true. Culture reflect values not the other way round - finding the common ground is about the struggle to define the unity of value and the diversity of culture.
I suppose you could google up some statistics to show that so many of such and such a cultures are fading away, to provide evidence of the death of culture as you so succintly put it, but I think this would be a bogus observation. Take the number of people living in Stone Age cultures, in the National Geographic sense of the word, and compare this to the increasing amounts of people who could be classified as Transnationals in one way or the other. New York is an inter national city, globalized if you will, and if you think of this idea spreading around the world you can easily see how we are becoming diverse and united at the same time. Domestically Europe with large groups of alienated arab nationals is facing this dynamic head on as they try to contain the beast within, but in the US when the Hispanics take over it will mean much less of a cultural shock since they are Christian and they don’t have that much cash.
It is of no surprise that the enemies we face, those that want to cause the death our culture, are themselves cultures of death. The antidote we offer is just the opposite. In some cultural respects we are finished with postmodernism, we have discovered the world and done all that medieval science could have expected us to, we have gone all the way up to hegel and Kant and back, the world is laid bare and we are at a new frontier, just as our enemy is still standing facing the middle aged one.
We are moving into the post nuclear age whilst simultaneously facing enemies from 1500CE, at a threshold appropriate to both where more good and more bad is possible than ever before. The battle is the same ol’ same ol’ separation of church and state - the responsibility is enormous - hope all these dudes know what the hell they’re doing.
Your talk of the death of culture can make it sound like a discrete event, but this belies it’s true nature which is continuous and dynamic. Existing cultures die slower than the rate at which new cultural artifacts enter the culture. The rate of appropriation of the new culture follows an s curve which by the time it reaches the top shoulder the culture has changed anyway, so the culture is still the culture but just different to what we had before. And the beat goes on.
From a Darwinian perspective, culture develops along functional lines and goes away when it becomes redundant, we no longer need a flintsone and sticks to make fire. As technology evolves perhaps more and more of our original nature becomes redundant. Compared to our cavemen ancestors who of us really needs all those funny bugs and so much survival instinct anyway. As a species we have never been less threatened in Nature, but that is not true in Life, guess there is no separation after all. This is a real flyer but I wouldn’t be surprised that if on the aggregate we have created more life forms in the laboratory than we have destroyed in the field - anyway all this might prove is that statistics are a stupid way of looking at this. Thinking we are god because we are in the lab, is the same bad idea that makes us not value clean air and clean water. If you protest and say but we do, then why do we act like animals which we aren’t, because they don’t pollute. As natural resources and demographics become the battleground, what will save us are our values, not our culture.
In consideration of the network effects of cultural change my proposition is that the communication explosion fostered by cyberspace, modern transportation and evidenced by the spread of ‘American culture’ is leading to more diversity not less. Ultimately culture resides at the level of conciousness and it is easy to be tricked into thinking that it’s becoming less diverse because in lots of cases people like to eat the same food and dress the same. Do you seriously think that Hollywood is about to take over Bollywood, I can assure you that the Mickey Dees menu in Delhi is different to the one in DC. It is much more likely that in time they’ll borrow a bit from each other to spawn a myriad of variations, witness the evolution of artistic forms for the earliest clues.
The economic evidence that diversity is increasing, is that in our own society as the old culture decreases it becomes more valuable, while new things get cheaper and cheaper. This growing gap reflects the specialization of resource allocation. In America the gap between the rich and the poor grows by the day and one could think this means that the middle is getting bigger when in fact it’s actually getting smaller. Since this is already happening this problem will be handled by changing the legal definitions one of these days. 911 addressed a domestic bifurcation of value, as in the aftermath we drew closer. On a global basis this polarization of value in the host is accompanied by an enlargement of the clients middle. This is diversity and unity in action.
We are in a fight for our values, materialisms excessess have given birth to the opposite and my theory proves bin laden wrong. ok it’s not quite as clear cut as that, but I still believe that freedom is the biggest american value on the planet. This is about the only reason I can find to be hopeful, and you know what they say about hope.
Bilow you are conflating evidence of unity with a decrease in diversity when in fact the opposite is true. Some say you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. |
