To moif I would say that it is quite a stretch to say that hiring foreign mercenaries is tantamount to an actual multicultural society and saying that multiculturalism destroyed the Byzantine empire still more so. I note it isn't exactly a view held by historians.

On "-isms" even the consideration of survival as a paramount end has itself a philosophical undergirding of materialism. You may not feel you subscribe to any one philosophical system, few people do... but our most basic assumptions on life have likely been classified hundreds if not thousands of years ago by inquiring minds. Study the history of philosophy and you'll find the "ism" dogged everyone from Aristotle to Zotz. It is a rather inescapable consequence of the organized mind.


This I must say is down right counter-historical. Nations have incorporated different religions and philosophies for as long as they've existed. One group may have held domination but there were always minority opinions.

This is a cornerstone of America right down from the protection of religious freedom and Federalists vs. the Republicans. Every one of the "common touchstones" has a counter example.

Nations are political entities wholly separate from culture.

I completely, totally and unequivocally disagree. Go back as far into history as you want--the predecessor of the modern nation state was the tribe; all tribes had a culture. End of story.

The example of religion in the USA you use is spurious--our culture was not one of total religious freedom, as is so cavalierly tossed about today, but rather that all Christians were free to worship as they chose, i.e. the Federal govt was not going to chose one sect, like the Episcopals, over another, like the Presbyterians. When the Const was ratified, many states had requirements of Christian church membership, for example, to hold elective office; none of that changed by the adoption of the Const, and indeed the First Am didn't apply to the states until the adoption of the 14th Am. and subsequent case law well after the Civil War.

The USA was founded as a nation of Western European ideals, language, art, music, literature, and religion--protestant Christianity. While the culture has morphed over time as the nation has grown, any nation whose culture gets too diluted will fragment. Heck, French and English Canada have nearly split several times solely over their language differences, as otherwise Canadians have very much in common. If the USA gets too diverse, it will split and fragment--no question about it--much like Soviet Russia.

While it is possible for cultures to spread across more than one "nation", no nation was ever formed, at least not without external conquest, by peoples who did not have common cultural touchstones. When cultures do spread across more than one nation, the border area is usually very unstable--Kurds in Turkey and in Iraq, for example. Nations that have been created by external conquest and political construct--like Iraq--are usually very unstable because they do not have the needed cultural touchstones to glue the package together.

1) Do nations and/or cultures have a right to defend their cultures against erosion or assault? What domestic measures are reasonable in this matter?

Well, the best definition of culture I ever heard was used in reference to the culture of a business, and was simply "the way things are done around here". In that context, where the senior management decided on a change of business strategy that required a cultural change to match, the rule of thumb was that it always takes a minimum of SEVEN YEARS to change the culture of a business. Businesses, by their nature, tend towards a much more rigidly defined and hierarchical structure than any regional, national, or religious culture, without even considering the vast differences in scale between all but the largest companies and all but the smallest cultures.

To use an example close to my own heart, even little Wales, with a definite cultural identity of it's own, has about 2.5 million inhabitants within it's borders, though something likea a third of those don't think of themselves as Welsh (mostly they're English or just generic British - a word whose origins mean the same thing as the modern sense of "Welsh" anyway, so we win ); and about half that number outside it that identify themselves as Welsh, be it Cymru Cymraeg or Cymru di Gymraeg (that's Welsh-speaking Welsh and non-Welsh-speaking Welsh to you heathens out there). So, about 3 million people think of themselves as Welsh - an order of magnitude more than even Microsoft can lay claim to.

Consciously changing a culture takes a conscious (and, in any open society, open i.e. declared) effort by successive generations of leaderships to change, with the open and declared support (or at least, the lack of opposition) of a majority of the populace. Cultures cannot be eradicated by force - ask the Romans, who found themselves having to adapt their rule to suit local conditions; or the English, who tried for 800 years to forcibly integrate the Welsh, and still didn't manage to remove the Welsh culture entirely.

Certainly, Welsh culture changed beyond recognition in those 800 years, but how much of that was down to conscious English efforts and how much down to simple economic disparities and general political, social and technical advances that changed England itself by the same degree? Without having a clone of the planet and everyone on it with which to operate a control experiment, we cannot know.

And the efforts of Welsh nationalists and culturalists to reinvigorate Welsh culture, specifically the language, took over a century, from their origins in Welsh non-conformist religion and ideas like Chartism, of constant pressure and campaigning, before the Welsh Language Act was passed in the early 1970s, making Welsh language teaching compulsory in Welsh state schools and creating the bilingual roadsigns that tourists find so impenetrable.

So it is possible for a minority to conscisously change a culture in a particular direction, but the pressure has to be sustained for many years, and has to be moving in a direction that is not resisted by the majority. You can change a culture against a resistant minority, but the timescales involved are so lengthy and the results so unpredictable that you might as well trust to the natural shift over time to accidentally favour you.

Christian missionaries in Northern Europe found that out. That's why the many churches were founded on pagan sites. It's why the festival to mark the birth of Christ got marked in midwinter with feasting, holly, ivy, gift-giving, and drinking. "Wassail" is an Anglo-Saxon word (when the A-Ss first arrived, they were pagan, and the Celts were Christian). It's why we eat chocolate eggs at Easter.

And Muslim invaders found out the same thing in North and Central Africa when they conquered there in the few centuries after the foundations of their religion. Female "circumcision" was and is practised across the region by more or less everyone, regardless of their religion. Somali or Sudanese Christian girls are no more or less likely to be genitally mutilated than their Islamic playmates, because, in the culture they live in, female genital mutilation is "the way we do things around here".

They also found it when they invaded Northern India, and found that the people there had such a strong sense of family honour they would kill members of their own kin if they were seen to have transgressed in any way, and such a view of women that they would be married off against their will as part of property transactions, something that had died out in Europe in the Middle Ages. This was not unique to their converts, but also happened among their neighbours the Sikhs and Hindus.

2) How do we measure a culture's "inferiority" or "superiority"?

Tricky. I like my culture better than most others I've seen, though some have things I wish we did more of, and some have things I'm glad we don't do.

I like the way Americans treat one another with politeness, but hate the way they see guns; I like the way the French do food, wine, and family, but hate the way they do business; I like the way Sri Lankans smile all the time, in spite of anything that might happen to them, but hate the way they tolerate all sorts of corruption even while recongnising it as wrong; I like the way Pakistani Muslims I've known can be so humble and friendly most of the time, and I hate the way they can become so angry and blind to argument at the drop of a hat whenever they feel slighted in any way.

Ultimately, I think ideas of inferiority and superiority conform to the same inverse "as above, so below" rules as most aspects of humanity. I like things in my own behaviour that I personally think I am good at, and dislike the converse behaviours in others. I dislike things I am bad at, and admire other people who are better at them than me (or, sometimes, feel jealousy and contempt for them). Scale that up to a national, tribal, racial, or other large-scale level, and you get a culture.



Oh for the sake of an historically-uncorroborated Jewish religious leader of the early first millennium (Common Era) - the introduction of the mobile telephone has changed British culture (and landscape - there are hundreds of times more mobile masts here than there are minarets) more in the last 10 years - e.g. we now talk on commuter trains (just not to one another) - than the Muslim and multiculturalist boogie men you are so paranoid about have in the last 1000.

Britain is as likely to turn into a free floating island that can be towed around the world wherever the ocean currents permit as it is to turn into anything approaching the Lebanon.

I know you don't like the BBC and you felt unsafe walking the streets when you lived here, and you feel something akin to betrayal when British newspapers didn't bother publishing some badly-drawn and unfunny political cartoons which everyone who wanted could see on the internet anyway, just like I did - that's how I know they weren't funny.

Why don't you just have done and make yourself a sandwich board with "The End Of The World Is Nigh" written on it? Or maybe a cute little chick costume so you can run around the farmyard predicting the imminent collapse of the firmament every time it rains? If you've nothing constructive to say, you might as well, you know.

Oh, and you can get off your high horse on the cartoons thing anyway; I didn't notice the whole of the Danish literary world publishing their own novels insulting Islam or digging into their pockets to contribute to the security of Salman Rushdie when The Satanic Verses were published, as the British were "supposed" to when cartoons thing kicked off. I daresay there were even some comments in the Danish press at the time - if it was even covered - along the lines of "well, it is a bit offensive" or "duh! what did you expect them to do?". This wasn't evidence of Danish cowardice or that Danes were some sort of unconscious Islamicists; it's just that the duplication wasn't necessary.

Well, no. Typically many different tribes shared a culture. Tribes were and are typically extended families. The bond was blood, not culture.

In tribal societies culture can be either rather transient like the Mongols and the Turkic tribes whose culture and even religion changed drastically as they traveled. Nomadic societies were often this way as a change in geography tends to cause a change in culture rather quickly.

Or they could be long-lived like the Ashanti who were agricultural and tended to stay put.

Culture generally does not begin and end at national boundaries, it was regional and even then fraught with exception.

In protestant America there was always Maryland. Africans were found slave and free long before the country was founded and brought their own culture. These may have been English colonies but the French cultural influence was heavy.

..and as moif and I have both made clear, there is no "Western European" culture.

Multicultural nations have been quite stable, the Roman Empire, the various Mongol states (such as the Mughal Empire) and Turkic empires (Seljuks, Ottomans) all lasted for centuries and we more likely to be conquered than fragment, just like any nation. Only when a ruler decided to homogenize the nation did true trouble start the Mughals are a prime example of what happens when multiculturalism is abandoned.

I too am weary of the fear-mongering that assails multiculturalism. Multiculturalism has done more good for this country that anything except natural rights philosophy.

All this I understand. Where I disagree is that I believe one can be neutral with regards to culture and still view one as superior to another. Perhaps it is impossible for a human being to be objective but on the other hand, I don't believe that this matters since culture is subjective to ones state of mind.


Yes, I agree with that. I counter that it does not matter.


I'd say that your confusing neutrality for objectivity. An objective perspective can still formulate opinions and pass judgement. The only way you can say there is no good or bad, right or wrong, is if you have refused to take a stand. Thats not objectivity. To be objective is to be influenced by the facts as opposed to ones emotions, but facts in themselves can indicate a simple truth, even if it is hard to see.


I cannot see how a culture 'just is'. If that were true then culture would exist independent of the people who comprise it. It doesn't. It simply can't. Once people have changed, or adapted to a new culture, the old one is gone. Example: Here in Denmark we have Viking re-enactors who get together, dress up in Viking clothes, live in Viking villages and camps, sail about in Viking ships and have a great time. At no point however have they managed to recreate Viking culture though. It is long gone. We have no idea what the Vikings were really like and the re-enactors are merely pretending.

Another example, would be old music. I listen to classical music a lot, but the associations I have with it are all my own. I have no idea what the cultural context of this music is. Stravinsky's 'Right of Spring' was shocking when it was first performed. When I listen to it, I cannot for the life of me understand why. My cultural identity is not the same as that first audience. If the existence of culture did not depend on the belief people had in it, then Stravinsky's music would still be shocking and the Viking re-enactors would have been able to transmogrify themselves into real Vikings as opposed to affluent Danes playing role playing games. They can't and it isn't, because we do not believe in the culture of those times. We believe in our own culture, for as long as it lasts in its current form. As time passes, so too will our culture and we will no longer believe in all the social rules, ethics and morals we hold to today.




Julian. I have not even mentioned any cartoons in this thread so I'm not sure what your problem is, though I'm beginning to suspect...

...in fact this topic is not about me so you'd do me a service by not trying to make it so.




I'm going to have to throw two quotes together to answer you turnea.



I think we talking past each other now for I do not hold to the contention that the USA is a multicultural society, or rather, America's claim to multiculture is a spurious one. Granted I have never been to the USA, but by my understanding, the vast majority of Americans consider themselves to be Americans first and foremost. By my understanding this is not multiculture as we're seeing it over here. Here we're seeing individual cultures springing up in defieance of and opposed to the surrounding culture. The biggest difference is where allegiences of these smaller cultures lie. A large group of third generation Turks living in Aarhus who consider themselves Turks first and foremost cannot be said to belong to Danish culture. They belong, by their own choice, to Turkey and yet here they are. This is what multiculture is. Multiple cultures coexisting within the same geographical location but not over lapping. Yugoslavia taught me that is for so long as people do not culturally intermingle, then they are living in a pressure cooker. No matter how long it takes, once the situation reaches the boiling point then the killing begins. The problem lies thus in those cultures which refuse to intermingle. Many cultures are already intermingled through out Europe and a few have refused to compromise. These few cause problems because they are elitist. Apartheid.


I'm not sure I can agree with survival having an undergirding of materialism. Again, it seems to me your logic is back to front. Materialism is dependent on the need to survive perhaps, but survival is coded into our genes and the last I heard, genetics was not a philosophical subject.


Steady on now, I didn't say that. I was asking you about your generalization. In fact I am not wholly convinced that cultures do not lie in multiple layers across each other and to some degree there is not only a pan European culture, but even a global culture too... It seems to me, to go back to the notion of mathematics, that the culture of a university's advanced math department would be one permeated by mathematics but that it would also be influenced by numerous other cultures, that of the university as aseperate social institution, the surrounding society and various international norms and practices.

Its this interweaving fabric that I believe makes it so difficult to quantify what culture really is (I think I said this in my opening post).
Example: Rock n roll is an American form of music that has been adopted by most all cultures in the world to some degree or other. Can it still be described as 'American culture'? To some people, what passes for global culture is 'American imperialism', despite the fact that there are home grown rock musicians even in countries like Egypt and Syria. Do these people subscribe to American culture or have they made the music their own?

So yes, there is a form of western European culture and you can feel it disapear when you go to eastern Europe. When you leave Europe altogether and go to America you notice yet another change in culture, somethings remain the same, yes, but other things are wildly different. This forum is a good example, religion on a Danish forum would not be an issue. Within Europe however, there are national cultures and smaller cultures again which even ignore national boundries and so on and so forth. Its all very complex and not easy to define.

Typically many different tribes shared a culture. Tribes were and are typically extended families. The bond was blood, not culture.

Tribes have a culture; blood relations preclude a culture?

Perhaps I can explain it this way--I LIKE America as a Euro-American construct: the language, the art, the music, everything. If it changes to be like, say, Brazil, then its not America anymore, is it? A better example may be the following: I live in the South, and Northerners come here and complain that the South is not like whatever Yankee village from whence they hail--the bagels aren't as good, we talk funny, etc.; I respond that if it were just like their Yankee village, it wouldn't be the South anymore, at least culturally, now would it? While the differences between North and South are more humorous than anything else today, you can stretch the differences only so far before there is a tear in the fabric.

It works very much like a balloon: You can blow a balloon partially full, and pass it to the next person, who blows a little more, and so on, but if you keep blowing, the balloon will finally explode....just like Soviet Russia did only a few years ago.

Common culture is the glue that holds any nation together....

No but neither do they imply a culture.

The fact is your entire assertion was based on a false premise.
1.) The tribe was not the basis for the modern nation-state.

2.) Tribes were not formed on the basis of culture.


It has made that change and it's still America.


I was born and raised in Alabama and have live here all my life. The fact is we are more like the north than ever. Our culture has seen enormous changes and has ever since the plantation died as the engine of economy. The biggest city in Alabama was the Pittsburgh of the South, an industrial city, just like northern centers. I see synagogues and Hindu temples and mosques and think nothing of it.

It is tolerance and respect that holds any nation together, cultures are coincidental.

To tolerate everything, to respect everything, is to believe in nothing.

I would suggest to you that you have no idea what holds a nation together. Have you ever been to France, or to Jamaica, or anywhere? If you cannot recognize that nations are the product of a cultural amalgam, that they would not exist but for that amalgam, if that is not readily self-evident to you, then I do not believe you have had a sufficient view of the evidence.

Americans share so much, and much of it is not evident until you leave it for a while. When you return, then you will see how distinct and powerful our culture truly is.

Why not give me an example of a nation formed by people who have totally divergent cultures. Just one. The only caveat is, as I have argued above, that the nation cannot be formed by solely by conquest. While such nations, like the ill-conceived Iraq, do exist, they are not very stable--as soon as the Roman bootheel was removed from the respective necks of their forced subjects, the Empire crumbled back into its cultually-tied components.

..but to tolerate another culture's harmless practices is to believe human dignity and individual freedom.

How about Italy formed through the unification of disparate city states?
Or Malaysia formed by union of former colonies much like our own United States?
Mexico, Cuba, Guyana.

I could probably do quite a few more.

I disagree with you here Moif. One could try to be neutral with regards to culture, but at the moment you are labelling different cultures in terms of superiority and inferiority, you have already lost your neutral position. Words like superiority and inferiority are compatible with words like good and evil, right and wrong only have meaning with a certain moral context. Morality and neutrality exclude eachother by definition.



If it doesn't matter that people look at there own and other cultures in a highly subjective manner, then any answer giving to question #2 is irrelevant.



I think concepts like neutrality and objectivity are closely linked with eachother. In order to reach an objective conclusion one needs to have a neutral attitude. An objective judgement is based on observable phenomena and uninfluenced by emotions or personal prejudices.(wordnet.princeton.edu) As with neutrality, you loose your objectivity when your conclusion is emotionally and morally charged with concepts like right and wrong, good and evil, superiority and inferiority.



I never meant to say that culture can exist independent of the people who compromise it. I was referring with this statement to your opinion that culture can only exist unless people believe in it. Problem with this is that people who are brought up in a certain cultural context, in general cannot think outside this cultural box. Their whole conciousness and thinking is trapped within a specific cultural paradigm. The belief in ones culture is not the reason why that culture exists per se. Many people say they believe in their culture, but paradoxically often times they have no concrete idea what their culture encompasses. They tend to focuss only at certain aspects of what they believe their culture is all about, but fail to realize that at the same time their culture is constantly and uncontrollably changing (due to all kinds of factors) and they are dragged into it no matter how hard they try to resist.

1) Do nations and/or cultures have a right to defend their cultures against erosion or assault? What domestic measures are reasonable in this matter?

nations clearly have a right to defend themselves against assault and "erosion".

Culture wars are a bit more like wars on drugs or on terrorism. While there are things societies can and/or should do to preserve their way of life or culture, if that way of life needs legislation to be adhered to then it is probably not going to be the way a free people would do things in the long run.

Part of a people's culture is its political system. A political system based on an ethnic nation as its guiding ideal is as at risk to disintegration by an influx of minority immigration as the multi-national empires were at risk to disintegration by the growing popularity of the ethnic nation state.

My observation on this matter is that no group of people is monolithic and when a political system starts enforcing certain social practices or standards on its citizens it starts creating minorities of people who are then oppressed by having to conform or be made outlaws.

I have my culture and way of life and I wish to continue practicing it. I wish the same for other people of the world and of my country.

My country has had a long list of nativist crises during which "native" born (never meaning Native American Indian tribes in this context) Americans feared an influx of immigrants and the impact that these people would have on the American way of life. So far, despite the chicken little cries that have included words concerns about "inferior" gene stock, a erosion of Protestantism through Jewish, Orthodox, Catholic (many want to have separate schools!), undermining of the political system as European radicals, foreign language speakers and others might not have the desire or the ability or the knowledge or cultural tradition to participate in the American democratic system in a healthy way, etc.

Every one of these crises the chicken littles have proven to be wrong for America. The American way of life has survived first German, then Irish Catholic, the the teaming hordes of Europe and Asia from different political systems, religious backgrounds, and language groups. We have many times in our history had a high percentage of our population speak languages other than English. Our inclusive system follows well what I call the golden rule of live and let live.

Those worried about the perils of multiculturism have caused many of the starkest blemished on American history, whether that be perpetuating slavery through concerns of racial inferiority of black slaves, exterminating Indians like vermin, or creating hysterical fear-based movements that allowed travesties of justice like Sacco and Vanzetti or radical witch hunts perpetuated my Joseph McCarthy scaring Americans for generations from wanting to be associated with anything remotely communist, socialist, red, commie, or pinko.

I disagree with people who do not promote my golden rule of live and let live. Many other societies do not have these freedoms that I cherish and do not want to forfeit.

2) How do we measure a culture's "inferiority" or "superiority"?

We don't. The very concept predetermines the result of the cultural study. Common life ways can be documented, measured, and qualified as to whether it makes up a dominantly practiced behavior for a group of people. When you are done cataloging the life ways of a culture you will have a long list. After that, have at it as a person from a particular perspective and evaluate away.

But deeming a culture inferior as a whole is simplistic and dangerous. This concept justified some of the worst actions in human history. the Inquisition, two waves of European imperialism, the Holocaust.

To deem societies like Greece and Rome and the Byzantine Empire and I would assume you might include the Ottoman Empire as failures do to multiculturalism is kind of like deeming the New York Yankees as the chief failure of baseball if or when the American baseball league ends. What I mean is that in the tides of history the one constant has been destruction. Things fall apart. Rome and Greece contacted and absorbed elements from around the world for hundreds of years and eventually their way of life ended. They were great successes not failures.

Sorry Renger. I get neutrality and objectivity mixed up as well it seems

What I meant to write was, I believe one can be objective with regards to culture and still view one as superior to another.


Indeed, which is why I wrote in my initial post; We don't measure a culture's "inferiority" or "superiority". We either like, or agree with it or not. It doesn't matter whether or not we are objective or subjective. What matters is the criteria upon which our analysis is based. In my assumption, survival is the base line for all moral considerations so it becomes the default critieria in examining the value of culture.

Sexual equality therefore, is not a given. Rathe rit is a consideration. The question can be asked, does sexual equality promote survival? One could argue that any society which maintains an equilibrium with its surroundings stands a better chance of long term survival, thus a culture which promotes such an equilibrium is superior to one which doesn't. Most Islamic nations which treat women badly, are themselves faring poorly. However, at the same time, cultures which promote rapid over population can expand and envelope those that don't. Which is then the superior culture? Its paper, rock scissors as far as I can see. Far from being out right superior or inferior, different cultures have strengths and weaknesses and this means that some will inevitably be stronger than others. Strength does not automatically equate to superiority, but its close enough to count when your talking fertility rates.


No you don't Renger. Objective simply means to take all the facts into account without allowing an emotional perspective to interfere. Neutral means not taking a stand. If these words meant the same thing, they'd be the same word. A judge and jury for example are meant to be objective, but not neutral. They operate within the criteria of law.
In other words; Judgement can be passed by an objective observer, but not by a neutral observer.


I disagree that 'superior' and 'inferior' are emotional concepts. A wasp for example is a superior hunter to a fly. This observation is not emotionally charged and based solely on the careful observation of insects. A culture can be deemed superior without the need for an emotional justification. simply by providing an unbiased criteria. For example, survivability.


Of course they can. How else do you think cultures ever change!? I think you'll find that in general, people are far more flexible to cultural diversity than are given credit for. Sure, they may be biased in their methods of adopting new idea's, but the fact remains that this biased approach is often one of the methods by which 'cross cultural pollination' takes place. For example, rock n roll, the blend of various musical styles to create a new genre, which is then spread and re-interpreted in myriad cultures across the globe.




Eeyore

I'm not saying they were failures. I'm saying they failed because they became tolerant.

My point is that hiring foreign mercenaries is not tantamount to multiculturalism.

Indeed Roman oppression of Germanic tribes was the primary reason they turned on them.

I would suggest to you the reason Italy finally unified under Garabaldi was because the cultures at that point were not divergent. Although unified under the Roman empire, it took 16 centuries after Rome's effective decay for the Italian boot to grow together enough to unify, which I think proves my point. I guess we have a chicken or egg issue here. If a nation is formed by agreement, then I would argue their culture has become unified. I do not think a nation unifies and then tries to figure out if they have a unified, national culture.

Non Sequiter.

A political union does not translate to immediate dissolution of the cultures.

Italy unified, despite the city-states having different cultures, because it was politically expedient to be a single unified country that could not the parsed up by its powerful neighbors.

My other examples remain as well.

You asked me to name a single multicultural nation, I named several.

1) Do nations and/or cultures have a right to defend their cultures against erosion or assault?

Yes, unequivocally. A society's culture is the glue that holds it together, and that forms the basis for its internal peace and unity. This doesn't mean that everything will be all kum-ba-ya. What it does means that when there are crises and controversies that inevitably arise, there's some unspoken, agreed-upon context in which there's at least a fighting chance of it being resolved. When the society lacks any kind of cultural anchor, this becomes far more difficult, to the detriment of nearly every member.

What domestic measures are reasonable in this matter?

Pretty much only external controls, such as immigration policy. Internal controls are a minefield. Not only do they risk giving government way more power than is safe for them to have, but they also almost always defeat the purpose. A culture needs room to breathe and adapt. You can't "mandate" a culture without inevitably turning into an artificial perversion of itself (which is one of the reasons I'm not too big on building codes based on someone's idea of aesthetics, as opposed to protecting health, safety, and the environment). We definitely don't need any kind of "Ministry of Culture".

2) How do we measure a culture's "inferiority" or "superiority"?

Well, you could judge it by its fruits. What's the human condition in lands where the culture is dominant?

Although I hope we may agree on more than we differ on I must repeat the main point I've been substantiating throughout this debate.

Namely, that no matter how many time we repeat the above phrase, it won't make it true.

Societies have been multicultural for centuries. Culture is not the cause of a society's cohesion, but an effect.

Political entities, maybe. You mentioned Switzerland earlier, but I'd characterize that place more as a loose confederation of societies. With a few exceptions, you generally don't have more than one culture occupying the same area of the country. On top of which, I'd really have to wonder how much of a cultural difference there is throughout Switzerland. They certainly seem to have a common political culture. It's possible that there's slightly more in common between a French-speaking and a German-speaking Swiss than between a French-speaking Swiss and a Frenchman or a German-speaking Swiss and a German.


It's both. Even societies that seem multicultural on the surface have, if they've been in that state for a long time, some sort of common overarching culture. While it's true that cultural uniformity isn't necessarily key to a successful society, cultural stability definitely is.

There are all kinds of things to consider when looking at culture. It's not just language, it's not just religion, it's not just ancestry, it's not just traditions, it's not just political ideology, it's not just general outlook on life. All of these things contribute, to one degree or another. Generally speaking, the more a society has any one or more of these things in common, the better able it will be to handle whatever history happens to throw its way.

Also, if a society is to be multicultural, it's usually better if those cultures are regionally conentrated, instead of mixed together in the same area, especially if there are fairly noticeable differences in the mores and public habits of the cultures. I'd almost guarantee that by that measure, there's far less difference among the various "cultures" of Switzerland than there is between the established Anglo-Saxon culture of the U.S. and the newly burgeoning Hispanic culture here.

Again, not true. A single culture may be predominant in an area but minority cultures in a society are an ancient tradition, the Jewish diaspora is one famous example in Europe, the Americas (US, Argentina, etc.), the Middle East which for centuries sheltered Jews and on and on...

...and I gave the example of Italy (as well as Mexico, Cuba, Guyana, etc), I'm not sure about Swiss society.


Fair enough, though I'd say more effect than cause.

People who live together often begin to share attributes, but that has little to do with stability. Cultural similarities are often regional affairs and have little to do with nations per se.


Interesting assertions, can you back them?

They've never constituted much more than a small minority in any of these places, and even at that their relationship with their host cultures has often been more than a little problematic (not blaming this on them, just pointing out the situation).


Seems to me that has everything to do with stability. When they live together for generations and develop an accomodation with each other, that's the definition of cultural stability.


I wasn't aware that anyone would seriously deny them. When people are able to communicate with each other (an obvious plus) and have a stable behavioral context in which they interact with each other, doesn't it come across as a bit more than likely that they'll be better able to resolve issues that arise among them than if that's not the case?

Also, isn't it likely that differences in public mores can lead to tension that can aggravate problems?

By the way, I know you also mentioned Italy and other confederations, including even the U.S. as it was formed out of the original 13 states. Even in those cases, where cultural differences are relatively minor and regionally based, it can arguably contribute to problems. It's true that there were pretty significant differences in political culture across both Italy and Germany. This may have been a big reason why both succumbed more easily to fascism and Nazism than other nations that had more of an established national political culture. Since the war, Italy still has been struggling, with no real continuity in government lasting more than a year or two, until about the last decade or so. Germany has certainly fared better, but I think that's owing largely to the wisdom of its decentralized approach to governance.

And then there's our own federation, which you mentioned. Model of success, right? I'd certainly agree, but I wonder how many people would have in 1861. And the war that was fought then was very much a product of cultural differences that led to sharply divergent economic interests. (the recognition of slavery's injustice certainly contributed to the controversy, but Northern whites being, at the time, nearly as racist as their Southern counterparts, the simple reality is that they weren't expending vast sums of blood and treasure purely as a humanitarian effort on behalf of blacks)

Often but not always and almost uniformly unnecessarily.

..but the point remains, multicultural nations are a common occurrence and have been for sometime.


Accommodation is not the same thing as sharing an overall culture. I agree that accommodation is necessary to stability, but argue that this does not always mean "assimilation."


That's why I love this debate. I contend that our view of culture and its true nature in a society has frequently been hopelessly near-sighted and many of our common-sense assumptions are in fact urban myths.


Communication is another key, I agree... but again this doesn't mean the cultures aren't very different. Heck the Amish tend to speak English well enough to get by.


This can happen but typically doesn't unless other more powerful forces are involved, for the Jews this has often been the rise of different forms of fascism for example.


..so very many "may" statements to back what was recently touted as common sense. What about Japan?

Let's put it on the line. Cultural differences can stoke conflict, sure. Though again I think you're confusing cause and effect in your Civil War example, it was the economic differences that caused the cultural differences.

So can many things can lead to conflict, that's why it is such a frequent occurrence. Resources, family spats, political upheaval. We have a million reasons to quarrel and among them culture tends to be an extremely poor one. If anything in nearly every conflict one can think of, cultural issues are just along for the ride and the real causes lie elsewhere.

A monocultural society is in effect no more stable that a multicultural society. Especially in this day and age the efforts that stem from trying to keep a society monocultural come at a high cost like in Japan's declining workforce.

We may be descending into semantics here. As I understand it, culture is the means by which the members of a society develop an accomodation with each other.


You won't get any argument from me on the general point that "common sense" can often turn out to be 180 degrees out of phase with reality. But in all such cases, the burden is on the challenger to it. It requires more than just pointing out that fact.


Japan hadn't succumbed to fascism. It was just continuing with its own cultural tradition, beefed up by modern industry. This harkens back to the whole superiority/inferiority thing that makes a few people in the West uncomfortable.


It's possible you may be right about that, but in either instance, it was the cultural differences that indisputably made the economic differences so hard to resolve.


This isn't much different from what I said earlier: "Generally speaking, the more a society has any one or more of these things [that define a culture] in common, the better able it will be to handle whatever history happens to throw its way." So while I could agree that cultural differences aren't always the cause of conflict, nonetheless in a very great many cases they get in the way of conflict resolution. They can also inhibit a society from uniting against common threats.


But that doesn't make Japan unstable. If anything's the cause of any political instability in Japan today, it's the conflict between its old culture and the new one that was forcibly imposed on it by us. And I'm not saying that there aren't benefits to introducing new cultural influences, or doing things that have that as a side effect (such as filling a demand for labor). The question for debate here is whether nations have the right to defend their cultures. I say yes, because cultural erosion often comes at a high cost. Nations have the right to decide for themselves how to weigh the risks and benefits that go along with it.

In some sense this is true, but historically many advocates of assimilation has argued that is is the duty of a minority culture to quire the habits of the majority. this is in fact the opposite to multiculturalism. The "adopt our culture or stay out" attitude.

Accommodation is simply making minimal adjustment to assist in practical matter. It is not the wholesale change of a culture.


Historians disagree. During the reign of Hirohito Japan saw a fascist takeover remarkably similar to those of Italy and Germany.
Adolf Hitler
Benito Mussolini
Hideki Tojo

Peas in a fascist pod.

One could say that Japan had a cultural tradition of authoritarian rule but no more than Germany. The fall of the Taishō democracy is not fundamentally different from what happened in other fascist nations at least when it comes to the rise of fascism.


Yes, but this no no more likely than a single culture being divided on response to a threat.

...but nations don't have cultures, communities within a nation do.

It might be a wholesale or a partial change of culture, depending on the degree of accommodation. Like I said above with the Swiss example, there can be an overarching national culture that embodies the superficially separate cultures that make up the nation. Speaking in the broadest terms, culture is just a pattern of behavior and outlook that spreads over some association of people. It stands to reason that they serve a purpose, because we're social animals.


Without getting into how exactly one defines fascism, the Taisho period was a small step away from Japan's cultural tradition, which Japan simply retreated back to. The Nazi era, however, went quite beyond what Germany had seen before. Granted, Germany was subject to different kinds of pressures after World War I, so there's nothing definitive here. I still think it's interesting that Italy succumbed to a decidedly un-Italian Fascism, whereas France did not, and even what Spain and Portugal experienced was something quite a bit less than full-blown Mussolini-style Fascism.


No more likely? Certainly it's always a possibility no matter what, but really, who's more likely to see each other as their fellow compatriots and comrades-in-arms when the chips are down? Maybe this is another thing you can downplay as faulty "common sense", but when it comes to matters of culture, common sense is, by its nature, part of the thing being observed. If people have a "common sense" that they feel more comfortable trusting those whose ways they're familiar with, then they means they actually are more trusting of those whose ways they're familiar with, and that has an effect on how they act.

Keep in mind another thing. I think we can agree that a society's culture is formed largely out of its experiences. So it's not only a means of accommodation of people with each other, but with their own circumstances as well. Newcomers with different cultural attitudes may not pick up on that quite as easily. For example, here in the U.S. we have a culture that places a very high premium on liberty. Other cultures may not be so inclined, and so it becomes reasonable to ask how vigilantly our liberty would be guarded if our own culture becomes too swamped by other cultures. (this becomes an especially serious question now that some in Congress are proposing to grant legal status to illegal aliens who join the military)


Just to reiterate what I wrote at the top of the post, Switzerland very much appears to have a culture that encompasses the more particular cultures that make it up. I think that's true of a lot of other nations as well. But either way, a nation has a right to defend whatever culture or cultures it consists of.

I would argue back that the nationalist fervor and submission of the individual will to that of the state was not a typically Japanese cultural position.

I'm afraid American experience of Japan is colored by this misconception because it existed in the public imagination as the land of the kamikaze until the end of the war and was largely absent before that time.

Japan had less of a democratic tradition than some of Europe but it was not non-existent. Before Taisho rule was the Meiji period which was typified by a movement towards constitutional democracy. Indeed Japanese lawmakers modeled the Meiji constitution on Prussian law. They rejected the American approach as too liberal, and the Spanish as too disposed to tyranny. (Good call on that last bit, not that it helped)

Indeed for many years after the fall of the Tokugawa shogunate (itself feudal and not like fascist Japan at all) Japan's trajectory was one of liberalization.

Fascist Japan was as much an aberration as fascist Germany.


Ask the Marquis de La Fayette or Kazimierz Pułaski. We shared more culturally with Britain than the French or Poles... but when the chips are down the people you see as comrades in arms are the ones shooting at the enemy.

Many cultures hold liberty in high regard. Indeed I think the sources of most of our illegal immigrants, especially Mexico, share a revolutionary heritage with that of the US.

Few cultures are fundamentally opposed or even disinclined to freedom, if any. None comes to mind. We must be careful not to confuse political developments with culture.


..and yet ethnic minorities exist in Switzerland that have cultures with exist outside of this context.

Submission to those in authority was. It may not have been the abstract "state" as it was understood in the 20th Century, but individual autonomy was still sharply limited for much of its history, and those in authority were vested with a religious aura, just as Fascism saw the state in religious terms. It just wasn't as far of a jump for Japan as it was for Germany, and Japan didn't go as far as Germany did anyway with its "Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Fuehrer!" dogma.


So the fact that you have two (highly educated and cosmopolitan) individuals from those other cultures proves anything about those cultures? Particular individuals can always be found from anywhere who'd be a great asset. When you're talking about masses of people, it's a different story. To look at the American Revolution further, we had quite a number of German immigrants who'd settled among us, who had very little conception of English liberty. What the native-born here considered tyranny, they regarded as freedom beyond their wildest dreams, and found it hard to fathom what all the fuss with King George was all about.


Sorry, you'll have to back that one up with something. I think we have every right, for our own safety's sake, to make the default assumption that the dismal political situation in many of these countries does have something very much to do with the cultures that dominate in those places, unless some very strong evidence to the contrary is presented. If Mexico has a tradition of freedom like ours, why didn't it wind up like us? In seeking to answer that question, you could start by seeing if you can find any Spanish version of the Magna Carta.


Those would have to be pretty small minorities. Nations can usually handle those without too much problem.

Blackstone: I would like to know more about this Magna Carta you are talking about and what differentiates this from the independence acts written everywhere in Latin America at the times when we were fighting our independency from Spain. Venezuela`s independence declaration, for example, following the french revolution ideas and also US independency movement as well (indeed, french people were fighting with us against Spain, and some Venezuelans, like Francisco de Miranda, fought in France with the french as well as in the US with your people against England - seems like there is a lot in common for the Americas' independency movements), stated clearly the right to freedom, equality and happiness of every human being regardless race or social condition. I doubt not that similar documents were written at the times in every country fighting for Independence. Colombia, Ecuador, Panama and Bolivia surely adopted the same spirit of Venezuela's document since Simón Bolivar was the one fighting and liberating them from Spain.

So maybe I'm not clear about this "Magna Carta" you mentioned but I found out it was a document written in England in 1215 that influenced your declaration of independence in 1776, which also stated: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.". It seems the same to me --> Ergo, we have our "Cartas Magnas".

I don't think this freedom tradition is what differenciates the two Americas (Anglo and Latin). Their differences are surely the result of more complex processes and history which I think belong to another debate.

The point of my bringing up the Magna Carta is this: mere words written in an independence declaration in the 18th or 19th century don't, in and of themselves, constitute a tradition of liberty. In the case of Anglo-American tradition, the idea of liberty - or more appropriately, proper restraints on government - wasn't invented in 1776. It had roots going back to 1215 and before. The Magna Carta was probably England's first written codification of these principles, and they only became stronger as Parliament became more of a force in English politics, culminating in the English Civil War which deposed Charles II for attempting to impose absolute royal authority, followed a few decades later by the Glorious Revolution and the adoption of the English Bill of Rights. None of these things had any kind of parallel at all in Spanish history. So Venezuela's independence declaration may have contained all the right things to say, but it's hard to avoid the conclusion that they were like good seeds scattered across mostly unfertile soil.

The divine right of kings. An old tale.

Submission to authority was a tradition in all feudal systems. The Japanese had (until the Meiji period anyway) a class system in which the most strict adherents of this philosophy (samurai) were more learned than the typical European knights and thus we have the tales of Hagakure and the like as first hand narratives rather than having to rely on Byron or his analogues. So we get a clearer picture of submission to authority in Japan but I would suggest you greatly exaggerate if you think fascist Japan was simply a natural outgrowth of "Japanese" culture whereas Germany was an aberration.



History strikes again!

German immigrants generally supported the revolution, and in fact Germans, like the French and Poles, and other nationalities we'll discuss later were active leaders in the revolutionary army.

Thanks, I had almost forgotten about that.


First I would like to point out the logical inconsistency of asking me to prove the politics were not related to the culture and thus prove a ngeative in a sense. Whilst you have yet to produce any evidence of the contrary viewpoint... or much at all I'll point out.

Mexico was a rather liberal democracy for a while and is heading back in that direction. The problem was not cultural, Mexicans have always loved freedom. The PRI, the former ruling party, just liked electoral fraud and voter intimidation. Again, political not cultural.

...as for Spanish traditions of natural rights.

School of Salamanca

The fact is Spain and especially Latin America share a freedom loving history. Indeed one of the most important figures in Latin American revolutionary history, Francisco de Miranda, fought with the States in the American Revolution.

Thanks for bringing that up, because it's not as old as often gets assumed. For most of the Middle Ages, there was a de facto separation of church and state (albeit of a rather different nature from how that term's been understood since the Enlightenment), with kings and popes largely at odds with each other. This was a development virtually unique to Western Europe. It was only in the late medieval and early Renaissance periods that the doctrine of royal absolutism started to replace it, and that was the period where the "divine right of kings" theory began to take root. It was far from universally accepted, as it began to give way, in rather short order, to the rise of notions of popular sovereignty brought about by the Enlightenment. So it was nowhere near as entrenched in European culture as it was in Japanese. In addition, even the Divine Right of Kings theory simply involved God conferring a mandate on temporal authorities. Japanese tradition, by contrast, conferred actual divine qualities on those authorities. Subtle but important difference.


Again, you're talking about individual leaders, not the people at large. At least, judging from the disproportionately high numbers of Germans who were among the loyalists who settled in Canada after the war, they seemed to be significantly more predisposed to loyalism than the country as a whole.


I realize it's a bit of an inconvenience, but like I said, we as a nation are entitled to act on the precautionary principle until it's demonstrated that this negative can be proven, or at least shown to be likely.


And Mexicans didn't have the cultural wherewithal to withstand that. It's all well and good to say that people "love freedom". They generally place a pretty high premium on food, too, but that doesn't mean they don't get faced with a lack of it in various places throughout the world. It's not enough just to desire something, you have to know how to obtain it and maintain it. When we're talking about a society, that inevitably means looking at its culture.

By the way, Mexico's history post independence was dominated far more by dictators, generalissimos, emperors, and the PRI's political monopoly than it was by "liberal democracy". When they achieved independence, they adopted a constitution very closely modeled after ours, but like I said in my previous post: good seed on barren soil.


And what impact did this school of thought have on the political reality in Spain or its American dominions? Let the site you quoted from answer that question:


There's absolutely no comparision between the quiet works of a group of scholars in Spain and the active, dedicated, productive, centuries-long struggle for freedom in England. And as you approvingly pointed out above, even the Japanese rejected the Spanish model of government as too disposed to tyranny.

This was hardly separation of church and state. Indeed the English king simply made himself head of another church.

Just because the kings had spats with the Pope didn't mean they lost their religious aura. Indeed Henry simply increased his to the highest level short of living God.

The rest of that paragraph is just counter-historical.


Link

Link

The marginalization of the emperor during the Tokugawa period says differenly. The only reason European kings weren't considered directly divine, like Roman emperors, was that Christian doctrine would have tagged this immediately as blasphemy. The concept was extended as far as the prevailing religion would allow.

I discussed both individuals and masses. As I said German immigrants largely supported the revolution.

Link
Link 2


..and just how did Mexican culture not mesh with democracy?

They rejected the constitution, not the culture. In a non-democratic system laws do not necessarily reflect the wishes of the majority.

The British were lucky enough to have a weak king. Spain was a stronger monarchy at the time. The revolutionaries in Latin America were plenty active...


Not as debaters. Logically this is a burden of proof fallacy.

It seems to me very presumptuous of you to pretend to know how much the people of Latin America love or don't love Freedom...It may be that you know by heart our history and the way we think and live....You are asking Turnea for proofs about traditions of freedom in other cultures, without giving proofs yourself about the less probable "fact" that we in Latin America (for example) don't appreciate or love freedom. You support what you say in the Magna Carta that has nothing to do (directly) with the US but with England.....I could say, for example, that it is England that has a tradition of freedom and not the US and what your founding fathers wrote was "just the right things to say or write". I won't say this because it would be just........presumptuous and very probably not true.

If you want actions, I could see this way, in the history of Latin America we have dealt with more Dictators and "Generalisimos" than in the US. We have dealt with them because at the end, we wanted freedom and want freedom - Do you have any proof that it is not like I say?

I tell you one thing, Blackstone...in the case of my country, Venezuela...we are proud of our history as freedom loving people who helped liberating not only ourselves but also Colombia, Ecuador, Bolivia, Peru and Panama from Spain. We got rid of one dictator and we also happened to end slavery 11 years earlier (in 1854) than the US did. Does it mean that we are more freedom-loving than the US? or that our culture is somehow superior to yours? Come on...Do you have proof for your statements or are you just speaking out of pure patriotism?