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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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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.

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