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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   35636 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 28, 2022

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Once you take the wide view on culture, you can start to see that stereotypical behaviors of cultures are the result of the pressures of that society. Congolese, Italians and Mexicans are not "lazy", they are optimized for their local culture, which does not reward work nor punish the lack of it. How this interfaces with global sort-of-capitalist economics is uneven at best.

Black culture in the US is likewise poorly suited to producing steady blue collar workers, but really good at producing various entertainers (at lottery-level rates), and extremely vibrant in cultural production/innovation. Black americans have better mental health and general happiness than many other groups, so the question of culture is also a question of what we value.

This is cultural relativism to a point. Cultures are not good nor bad, but they are good/bad for specific things. Jewish/north european/east-asian culture generally produces people well suited to modern mechanized capitalism, so they do well in modern mechanized capitalistic societies. Native american, Hmong, Somali etc. cultures by and large do not. Much of what gets called "structural racism" is in fact merely cultural mismatch to the political and economic realities of the world.

Every culture must follow their own path in responding to modernism/globalism, but some paths lead to better places than others.

One can admire the Chinese/Japanese work ethic, but I'd rather live as an Italian.

Black americans have better mental health and general happiness than many other groups, so the question of culture is also a question of what we value.

In theory.

In practice this question is more and more devolved to the market in the West, so not all cultures are equal.

Given the clear material issues with the black population (e.g. disproportionately high crime and poverty) they're not really a model, in practice. Yes, cultures are good and bad at specific things, but some cultures are good or bad enough at enough of the things we care about that they're seen as exemplars or models as a whole.

There's a lot of slack for personal preference if you consider the GDP per capita of Japan vs. Italy. However, there'll be much less divergence of opinion if it was Japan vs. Congo.

This is the root of American racial dysfunction: there are many cultures that could be said to be a success as a whole in American terms (again: in the market), but black Americans aren't one of them. I don't think any of the "well-off" ethnic groups would trade their place in America's class hierarchy for that of the blacks. Good music and dance is nice and all but it doesn't seem to translate to a lot of the goods we care about. As you say: a tiny percentage of people win that lottery.

I certainly don't mean to imply that all cultures are "equal" in some cosmic sense. Some are just light-years ahead in terms of what outcomes they produce. A very small subset of cultures give us the modern world, the first and only time in human history in which the vast majority of people were not poverty-stricken peasants on the edge of starvation, disease and predation.

I do mean to say directly that even pretty bad cultures are usually that way for a reason, and have their good points that make people want to continue them.

Some cultures just need to die, as they outlive their usefulness. Every time I see someone trying to resurrect some dead language or culture, it's a ridiculous spectacle. Let Welsh go. We don't need it, the Welsh don't need it, words don't all need twelve "l"s in them, there's no point to it. We can all chuckle about it when it's white european native culture being supplanted and driven out of existence by more competitive options, but everyone gets squeamish when it's non-europeans.

There are no hunter-gatherer cultures that can be useful enough to reproduce in the modern day. There's few if any agricultural ones, and the industrial ones are on the block next.

We do, in fact, still need agriculture and industrial production, unlike Hunter-gathering.

Now if you mean traditional subsistence agriculture, yes, that exists for the museum value at best. But the vast majority of the world’s agricultural production is very much needed.

Agricultural production, yes. A culture of agriculture, not at the societal level. Farmers will probably always have a certain amount of professional distinctiveness, but their existence does not really form the backbone of the national culture. They are an incredibly small group in a modern society.

We also maintain certain hunter/gatherer subcultures (from urban foragers to the large number of actual hunters), but they too are more culturally similar to hobbies than they are to societies.

Agriculture pretty much has to take place in certain areas(flat, rural places with good soil and ready access to water), so the idea that farmers will one day not dominate a society of their own- the very nature of agriculture means it doesn’t play very well with other industries nearby- seems simply dumb.

I’ll be thinking about this one for a while. Especially every time a top-level gets made about Jewish representation.

How much of culture do you think is constrained by relative tech level? If modern venture capitalists were given unfettered access to 18th-century English cottage-industry peasants, I suspect they’d see a similar response. Maybe the previous years of an English state were enough to condition efficient workers...but my guess would be not.

For obvious reasons, I can’t remember seeing any scholarship on the topic.

I don't know if "constrained" is the right word.

I think some cultures are inherently better at adapting to new technology. Others are almost incapable of it, with a bell curve inbetween.

Think Japan versus India versus Australian aborigines.

I guess I’m trying to disentangle culture (meaning interpersonal relations, obligations, division of labor) from culture (meaning societal organization).

I have a suspicion that the average English peasant had similar interpersonal relationships as the average Congolese. English adaptation to tech would then be driven more by a culture that let it cajole them into useful labor anyway. That probably means state capacity, but also norms about rent extraction and the available alternatives to industrial work.

Dump a Chinese railroad company into pastoral 1790 England, and I’d expect them to come up with all the same criticisms from the documentary—unless they took on more statelike powers.

It’s a nice story, partly because it avoids the standard /pol/ conclusion exhibited on that KnowYourMeme page. But I don’t really know much about how England supplied labor in early industrialization. I’ll do a bit more research and probably make a top-level later.

What was the reaction to 18th century English poor going to the mills?

I don’t think it was...great.

Obviously it worked out for England, as the state parlayed that technological advantage into a ludicrous economic one. Did the peasants get “pulled” into vast economic opportunity, or “pushed” out of a non competitive textile market? Whig history prefers the latter explanation. It’s really not my area of expertise.

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