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You're misunderstanding my point. I'm saying whatever it is you like about "American culture" or "Anglo-Saxon culture" or whatever specific culture it is that you're trying to preserve, that culture only exists because of cultural mixing and change. "Your culture" came about as a result of the Angles and the Jutes and the Danes and the Celts all mixing together.
If you're saying that cultural mixing is always bad, then why do you want to preserve "your" culture? If you're being logically consistent then you should also conclude that your own culture is bad because it is a "corrupted" admixture of other cultures.
If they could have stopped the Vikings from raping and pillaging, absolutely. But it's not clear why it would have been a good thing for them to stop the cultural admixture. If they had prevented the mixture from occurring, then the culture that you're trying to preserve wouldn't exist. So presumably you agree that this cultural mixing was good if you believe that your own culture existing is good.
Because it's my culture. Just like I would care about a different family if I had been born in a different family. I wasn't, so I don't.
Yes, all cultures came into being by mixture/corruption from various forces throughout history. So what? If I was a member of those cultures pre-mixture/corruption, I'd probably have advocated resisting that change. I wasn't, so I'm not. I'm not, because I don't care. I don't care, because I'm not a member of those past cultures.
I don't understand what's so complicated about this. I feel like I'm explaining to a Martian why we humans care about our families more than we care about other families.
If you care about your family, then you probably don't want your kids to grow up to marry their siblings or cousins. You want them to marry members of different families. Loving your family necessarily implies that you want your grandchildren to have fewer of your genes than your children, and for your great-grand-children to have fewer of your genes than your grandchildren. The long term health of your bloodline depends on it being mixed with other bloodlines. Trying to keep your bloodline unchanged for generations is a profoundly bad idea. Also, it's probably impossible without significant coercion. People generally don't want to marry their family members unless they are forced to do so.
The same is true of your culture. It was produced through a process of mixture, and it will only continue to exist and re-produce itself through a process of mixture. Trying to arrest this process will not preserve your culture, it will cause it to wither and die. And it is impossible to do this without extreme levels of coercion; you would need to ensure that your culture remains completely closed off from the outside world, which is a nearly impossible task.
If your ancestors had been effective at doing this, your culture wouldn't exist. The fact that you love your culture implies you are glad your ancestors didn't successfully prevent cultural mixing. Perhaps you should consider whether there is anything you can learn from your cultural ancestors.
Do you believe that all cultural elements are equal, or are some elements good and some bad?
If the latter, then you yourself do not want "a process of mixture". You want the right mixture, which delivers results in keeping with your core values, and you absolutely do not want those core values to change.
Or am I wrong, and you would accept our culture "mixing" with openly-genocidal racial supremacism, hardline blood-sacrifice-based theocracy, slavery, etc, etc, such that their practices became our practices?
A better metaphor might be the human body. To keep the body alive, you can't just eat sugar, or salt, or protean. You need water, fats, protean, vitamins and minerals, some of this and some of that. You need different foods at different times, depending on age or circumstance. What you don't need is a heaping plate of lead, crushed glass, or radioactive cobalt.
One might even extend the metaphor further: people adapt to their local environment. Everyone needs water, but water is often not perfectly clean. People living in an area acquire immunity to the local pathogens, such that they can safely drink water that would make a foreigner desperately sick. Even things that might seem identical on the face of it, might conceal hidden incompatibilities.
I believe elements of culture can be good, neutral, or bad. Though this determination will depend heavily on context or "local environment" as you put it. For example, whether "all able bodied men must be proficient at archery" is a good or bad cultural trait depends heavily on context.
I think the only mechanism that will produce the right mixture is free association of individuals in a free society. I believe that free speech and open debate tends, over time, to promote true and useful ideas while destroying bad or counterproductive ones. Similarly, I think free association of individuals in a free society will tend to promote good cultural values and demote bad ones, since people are materially rewarded for adopting the good values and discarding the bad ones. People respond to incentives.
The alternative is some sort of top-down system where a person in power decides which cultural values are good and which are bad. Just as this structure tends to fail badly when applied to economics and ideas, it also fails badly when applied to culture.
I think a free and open society will quickly destroy bad ideas like those, so I am not particularly worried about my culture mixing with them. Racial supremacy, human sacrifice, and slavery are all extremely economically inefficient and in a free society people who adopt these practices will be materially worse off for doing so. These practices can only persist if they are being propped up by a central power structure.
And this belief comes from your observation of "free individuals" in a "free society"? If so, could you name which individuals and what society you have in mind, as an example of what these terms look like in practice?
It is good to know that the universe has ordained that all incentives must be net-positive, otherwise one could be forgiven for worrying that bad incentives might result from freely-made individual and communal choices, and then perpetuate themselves indefinitely. Fortunately you have found a free society with free association, where no such incentives have arisen; if you had not, the many observations that contradict your theory might be mistaken for a refutation.
Yes, I've observed many systems that are a reasonably close match to this description. In fact, every system I've ever heard of has been pretty close to this description, but I am certainly not omniscient. What you are describing is a specific, successful, non-hierarchical society with a long history of stability and prosperity, correct?
If we wish to say that such systems "fail badly", one ought to demonstrate what "succeeds" looks like with concrete, large-scale examples.
If such ideas were not destroyed but instead achieved dominance even within a free and open society, such that they then destroyed the freedom and openness and cemented themselves in long-term control, what would you say should be done?
Or to put it another way, is your love for freedom and openness a means, or an end? If freedom and openness could be demonstrated to enable evil, would you still support them, or would you accept that some level of restriction was necessary?
This statement implies that central power structures are optional. If they are not, if centralized power and hierarchy are in fact an inevitable consequence of human nature, wouldn't that imply that such ideas are in fact persistant, and likely to remain so?
This is a matter of degree. The US is freer than North Korea or China. And within the US, some places are clearly freer than others.
Characteristics of a free society include:
The ability to privately own guns and other weapons sufficient to enable the violent overthrow of a tyrannical government;
Free speech and free association;
All adult humans are equal before the law and are entitled to due process and the presumption of criminal innocence;
The right to engage in consensual transactions and to dispose of one's property as one chooses without permission;
The right to bind oneself with enforceable contracts.
Given a choice between a good thing and a bad (or less good) thing, a person with full information who is able to freely choose between them will prefer to choose the good thing. This is the definition of "good" I am operating under.
There are systems where a single central authority has a massive amount of power to make cultural decisions (e.g. North Korea, Spain in the 1500s, Iran), and there are systems where cultural authority is more distributed and less centrally powerful, e.g., the US. I would prefer even less centralized cultural power than currently exists in the US, but again it is a matter of degree.
Centrally planned economies like Soviet Russia and North Korea produce little wealth and generally cause massive amounts of starvation. They also tend to produce untrue ideas at a high rate, such as Lysenkoism. Decentralized economies like the US produce comparatively more wealth, less starvation, and more empirically correct ideas. It is a matter of degree, but the degree of difference is extremely large.
It is a means. If you demonstrated that freedom and openness have a higher likelihood of causing bad outcomes as compared with another specific alternative system, I would change my view. However, I consider the empirical evidence in favor of freedom to be overwhelming, so I would require a considerable amount of evidence in the other direction.
The degree to which power is centralized, and the kinds of power that such central structures have, clearly vary in different times and places. I don't think it's possible to eliminate central power, but I think it is possible to considerably reduce the influence of central power and to place checks on the exercise of such power (e.g. via the private ownership of the means of war).
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Genetic problems from incestuous relations is a problem. There is no comparable problem for people of one culture interacting with people from that same culture.
And I'd probably care about whatever culture I would have ended up having. Just like if I was born into a different family, I would care about the family I was born into and not the one I have in the reality we live in.
At this point, I am convinced this conversation with you is not worth my time, sorry.
I don't know. The physical problem with sustained inbreeding is the pathologies that occur when recessive genes with the same harmful mutation are paired together, and low genetic diversity in a group makes it more vulnerable to pathogens and less flexible when conditions changes. It's not absurd to make an analogy with cultural and social diversity. If people get all their memes from the same metaphorically-inbred pool than deleterious memes are harder to identify and lose, and it becomes harder to generate new ones. A society with low cultural and intellectual diversity would allow viral memes to spread more easily, would be very vulerable to social pathologies that different societies could avoid, and would have fewer resources to deal with changes in circumstances.
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At this point it seems you are conceding there's nothing special about your culture that makes it intrinsically worth preserving. You're just saying "it happens to be my culture by chance, therefore I want to preserve it" (why this conclusion follows from this premise is left as an exercise for the reader).
Even I wouldn't concede that there's nothing valuable about my own culture. There are a number of things about my culture that I find valuable, that I intend to pass on to my children, and that I hope they will continue to pass on as long as those things remain valuable in the ever-changing world my descendants will inhabit. I get the impression that I actually value and care about my own culture far more than you do, I just don't feel any need to keep it "pure" and unmixed with other valuable things from other cultures.
Fair enough. Have a nice day.
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