Here’s this week’s column concerning why modern people tend to want to avoid the burden of upholding culture.
This bit was inspired by all the reading of Roger Scruton that I’ve been doing recently. Multiculturalism in particular is a sort of low-effort cop-out for Western elites. By saying that other cultures have as much or more value than their own, they can slink away from their obligations to uphold it.
This is also an area in which libertarians in particular tend to go wrong. The only way that you could ever conceivably maintain a low-tax, high-capitalism country is with low taxes, high property rights, and high cultural obligations. When the leading segments stop ‘paying in’ to the same culture that made the civilization possible, everything begins to unravel, and the conditions that made the civilization possible in the first place evaporates.
I enjoyed this one. If you got the idea from Scruton, I suppose I’ll have to give the devil his due. But your central claims make no pretense to objectivity — you don’t say “Western civilization is great because it’s beautiful” or anything like that. Your unspoken assumption seems to be, “It’s necessary because it’s ours,” which I like far more.
And it is no doubt true that there is an uneasy alliance that we can see between hyper-atomized individualism and globalist McWorld consumerism. The defense against this is found in preserving the cultural memory of separate peoples that we can divide on racial, linguistic, and/or religious lines.
(As for Beauty: An Intro, I’m like halfway through it. And I haven’t really changed my mind on Scruton so far. The enlightenment really screwed up a lot of things — the way we understand culture and art being one of them. Although I say this knowing that my own mentality regarding these things has probably been itself permanently tainted by the Romantics, so it is not as if I’m squeaky clean, here)
This point you’re raising is also why I have never subscribed to libertarianism. In that particular domain, capitalism reminds me a lot of democracy. When people buy a Britney Spears album and eat a Big Mac, they’re voting with their dollars. Same goes for when they go see a movie like 2 Fast 2 Furious (or whatever). The laissez-faire capitalist system could only work with a number of socially conscious billionaire patrons of the arts. But I don’t see it happening. Conservatives have either shirked their duty to keep the memory of Western culture alive by focusing solely on econ and foreign policy, or they have settled on a very rigid understanding of culture, typically owing to the 18th-19th century, which dis-privileges the one thing that has always characterized the most celebrated creations of Western art: their innovation and their audacity — their Faustian bombast. In sum, no mode of statecraft should treat culture as a strictly consumer-controlled feature.
Strange. I was just thinking that earlier this evening (about subjective preference for the west vs. objective supremacy), but I don’t think I articulated it directly in the text.
That’s also a disagreement I had with Charles Murray’s “Human Accomplishment” — trying to argue for Western supremacy by virtue of citation count. Good book with an odd core argument.
Could we say that Western Culture is superior for westerners? Westerners have evolved along with the culture, and we have certain genetic traits that makes us suitable for western patterns of thought.
One can admire the culture and history of China, and acknowledge it as great, however, I don’t think such a culture should be imposed upon westerners. It wouldn’t work. Nor would imposing western culture upon China work. There is plenty of evidence that there are certain genetic traits among East Asians that make them particularly suited for the culture that they have developed.
Thousands of years of history, and our adaptation to it, and the adaptation of our culture ought to count for something. But it doesn’t among progs, who think we ought to adopt practices of the bushmen of Africa or the Japanese.
It’s not actually just progs. Foreign cultures tend not to blend well. One culture usually winds up dominant over a given territory, because that’s how competitive systems work.