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).
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).