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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 19, 2024

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That makes their dominance more impressive, if they can create an entertainment product that beats the West at its own culture (if we consider the Middle Ages to still be our culture).

What dominance? They are producing entertainment products in line with the paradigm of another culture- which is to say, they are emulating others, rather than the other way around. If there's any cultural dominance to be had, it would be of the influence of the customer's culture over their own, rather than the expression of their own.

They receive the money and they control the resources. This gives me a funny image in my head of an Italian Roman claiming the Goths aren’t dominant because they only control Rome with Italian norms… yes, but they are the ones who control it and reap wealth from it. Foreign entertainment is the worst trade in existence: Chinese get to grow economically and employ people and in exchange American young men waste their time on addicting entertainment. They get everything of value, cementing their dominance, and we get ephemeral thrills. That sounds pretty dominant to me.

Now, is a Middle Ages fantasy-scape really “our culture”? I’d say no. Americans aren’t very influenced by the culture of the Middle Ages. And the fantasy scene is really a gloss with nothing underneath. Okay, their fantasy architecture has spires of church, but there’s nothing deeper there. Rather than giving us “culture points” it probably reduces how much we ourselves care about our culture. (Imagine a young kid seeing a beautiful church: wow, this looks like Elden Ring!)

That sounds pretty dominant to me.

Then your concept of dominance is based on a peculiar non-general understanding of dominance, as is your characterization of culture. There's not much else to deal with, any more than anyone else who selectively defines words to make selection-bias arguments.

There are many errors here. (1) Making more money and having more resources is universally considered dominance, and it is a dominance most associated with objective measures of national health, so I don’t actually know why you want to focus on “cultural dominance”. (1a) To make a very mottey example, Jews were dominant in the early years of Hollywood and historians would say as much, yet all of their major products fell in line with plainly goyish and Christian / post-Christian sensibilities… this was still to their benefit, as they made lots of money this way and were able to influence things slightly over time. (2) You haven’t argued why cultural dominance is a fruitful lense to look at entertainment products. (2a) We have many examples in history of clearly dominant groups wholecloth appropriating the aesthetic sensibilities of other nations: the Romans to Greeks, the Muslims to the Byzantines (the star-and-crescent was a Byzantine symbol), Germanics to the Romans. (2b) Entertainment products appropriate the surface-level artifacts of culture but not necessarily anything deeper, with Disney the best example: it appropriates Western art, but that’s it, and visual culture is often appropriated from a different group. (3) Appropriating the aesthetic sense of a different culture does not change the substantive kernel of culture, things like an individual’s relationship to work, family, community, values. A deeper analysis of these games would show a thoroughly Asian obsession with skill mastery, objective grading and peer competition and meritocracy, values which are actually absent the European Middle Ages whose focus was emotional [piety, love]. (4) If Western culture were dominant, we should see it in its fruits: its ability to make compelling leisure experiences. Why didn’t a Western company make Wukong or the other products? The power which enables one group to make more money than another group is indeed a cultural power in its rawest sense, especially when that money is made meritocratically, eg a video game that people buy after looking at gameplay. (5) What does the modern West have to do with the Catholic Middle Ages? Even Catholics are very far away from that culture.