It's important that cultures disappear

http://bgblog.quora.com/What-Important-Truth-Do-Very-Few-People-Agree-With-You-On-Its-Important-That-Cultures-Disappear?share=1

by baristaGeek • 12 years ago

20 44 12 years ago

bgblog.quora.com

baristaGeek• 12 years ago

Many of you have probably read, or at least heard about, Peter Thiel's Zero to One. A core concept of this book is asking your self: "What important truth do very few people agree with you on?", I recently answered the question in Quora, and decided I'm going to write an essay for each truth I mentioned. Here's the first part of the trilogy.

phaemon• 12 years ago

Unsurprisingly, I think you're wrong!

An unspoken assumption in your essay seems to be that people can only have one cultural identity, which is plainly incorrect.

There is also no definition given of what it means for a culture to 'die'. I'll offer that it's when there's nobody left who follows any of that particular culture's elements. And it's when we break it down by element, that I really think your argument doesn't hold together.

Take language for example. Clearly it's a central part of cultural identity, whether used for inclusiveness or as a shibboleth. What you're basically saying is that it's important that I stop speaking a particular language. Why? Being able to speak a language other than English gives me a broader understanding of language generally, and improves my English. Why should it be important for me to stop?

Or take another fundamental of culture: music. I listen to Scottish music and sing Gaelic songs. Why is it important for me to stop doing this? More generally, what exactly is the One True Music that we should all be listening to, to the exclusion of all others?

I think I'll leave it there, lest this turn into a massive rant ;-)

jdmichal• 12 years ago

To support your point, I learned as much if not more English grammar during my several semesters of German in college than throughout most of my prior schooling.

dweinus• 12 years ago

"The best way to achieve a global, optimal monoculture..." Why would you assume that the best monoculture is better than an ensemble of locally optimal cultures? It seems unlikely for that to be true when the variables that cultures form in response to differ by locality: climate, native flora/fauna, terrain, economy, demographics, etc.

_glass• 12 years ago

As an MA student of intercultural management I have to disagree on several points. In general this text is what cultural scientists call ethno-centric, assuming a priority of one culture over another. But culture is just one solution to a solution space, that is made pushed into the unconscious, through unlearning. It's a bit rough to summarize several papers on this topic, e.g. there are several definitions for cultures, but this one fits the text. These solutions can be mediated and made to create synergies. So instead of proclaiming one global culture, it's better to see the different cultures as they are and mediate in the 3rd space where two or more cultures meet. To be a bit meta about the aspect of national culture (which is really just one aspect) as an American I would have sandwiched the answer with two compliments, but as a German I just put it frankly, and the intercultural competence let's me declare this meta-remark.

abandonliberty2• 12 years ago

I agree that there is no 'superior' culture, yet standardization can result in superior overall outcomes even if point outcomes may not be optimal. Programming, construction, and manufacturing standardization are all founded on that principle.

Based on your education I'm hoping you can share your insight. I have observed that some homogeneous cultures such as Taiwan, Japan, and the Mexican Yucatan have a much higher degree of social cohesiveness and responsibility than areas with mixed cultures. Is there evidence that their homogeneity and breakdown of in/out groups plays a role?

Ar-Curunir2• 12 years ago

I'd rather live in a inefficient but non-homogenized world than one where everyone has the same viewpoint on most things but things are done efficiently.

To me the situation proposed in the article sounds like something out of a dystopian novel.

Furthermore, how would you pick one culture to standardize upon? English is only the de facto language of the world because of forced colonialization by the British, and USD is the de facto currency of international transactions only because of the excessive economic and military power that the US wields.

gboudrias• 12 years ago

Indeed, this is basically offensive to me (a non-American). It's like saying "it's important that old people die so we can turn them into food". It might be more efficient, but disregards everything that people hold dear that can't be quantified.

I'm also not going to engage in this discussion with the biggest cultural empire in the world. I'm sure very few Americans are aware of this, but a lot of folks see American culture as predatory, and homogenization coming from them is basically synonymous with assimilation.

humanrebar8• 12 years ago

excessive economic and military power that the US wields.

What makes it excessive? How much economic and military power is proper?

cryptoz• 12 years ago

(Not the person you're replying to, but I'll add a quick note about the military part):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_e...

I think that having a military 2x as big as the next biggest is a sufficient definition for 'excessive'. And here, it's a lot more than 2x.

scott_karana• 12 years ago

Maybe "disproportionate" would have been a more diplomatic adjective? ;)

dhekir• 12 years ago

We have pretty much agreed upon the English language.

Most people did not agree on it, but were pushed towards it due to economic dominance. Non-native speakers may still resent their disadvantage and would not call it an "agreement".

humanrebar8• 12 years ago

but were pushed towards it due to economic dominance

Or perhaps English is good at some things that are especially useful these days? This was posted on HN a while back:

http://garrett.damore.org/2014/10/your-language-sucks.html

...the author proposes that certain languages are easier to represent electronically. I'd certainly like to see more thought and investigation along these lines.

I think ascribing the entire thing to coercion is premature. Do you have any corroborating evidence for that position?

EDIT: After writing this, it occurs to me that British colonialism was coercive in many (most?) aspects. That being said, English has been growing as a lingua franca (hah!) since the British empire has waned, so we need a mechanism more complex than coercion to explain the growing popularity of English.

superuser22• 12 years ago

It's probably relevant that early/dominant character encoding schemes were largely created by English speakers. Of course English is easier to represent.

I'd be interested to see what advantages other languages pose. I wouldn't be surprised if there are foreign natural languages that are much easier to parse for meaning programmatically than English (i.e. languages where conjugation and word endings provide explicit information that must otherwise be inferred from context/knowledge of the world that it's much harder for a computer to acquire.)

GFK_of_xmaspast2• 12 years ago

The United States isn't as good as empire as the British were, but it's still pretty coercive.

lcedp• 12 years ago

The article you mentioned is not actually about languages but scripts. As a example you can represent Chinese in transcription.

English is popular due to historical, political and economic reasons not for any linguistic reasons. As any lingua franca ever was so far. If the world could agree on using easier to learn and more fair (meaning for all nations) language - we'd be speaking Esperanto or better Lojban.

lukev• 12 years ago

  In order for humanity to truly achieve an optimal culture [...]"

You lost me here. Optimal by what metric? And making value judgements about cultures strikes me as a risky, risky business...

binarymax• 12 years ago

Cultural differentiation is not only a basis for art, creativity and innovation, it is also absolutely necessary for adaptability and survival. Over-Specialization and uniformity will have many negative consequences.

im3w1l• 12 years ago

People have commented that English is just the international language because of forced colonialization and economic dominance.

As someone whose native language is not English, I am very happy that English has become the standard language. Not because English is particularly good, but because it is A standard.

Ar-Curunir2• 12 years ago

Sure, but the point is that to achieve this standard, a lot of blood was shed and a lot of countries were exploited.

Enforcing a uniform culture would almost certainly involve some use of force because people hold their cultural identities very dear to themselves (rightfull so IMO). Robbing them of this identity and enforcing a external one would not go down well at all.

Even today, most people who are speak English that were not born in a English speaking country speak another language. So it isn't the case that English has supplanted native languages, but rather has supplemented them. This, despite years of colonial domination.

kazinator2• 12 years ago

Indeed, for instance, someone Japanese doing business in Korea can use English and be understood. Whether that came about due to colonization or dominance is irrelevant, because neither side is pushing English culture on the other in that scenario any more. In fact it gives them a kind of neutrality; I don't ask you to learn Korean, don't make me speak Japanese, let's use English; we can both use that elsewhere. I'm meeting some people from Thailand later; you're going to India tomorrow, ...

This English use in meetings nobody is a native speaker, taking place in a non-English-speaking country, is a remarkable phenomenon when you think about it.

jorjordandan• 12 years ago

Obviously, the point of this essay is that it is supposed to be easy to disagree with. But I feel obligated to take the bait for some reason..

The idea of a single global culture is a pretty dark path, historically speaking. It is a utopian concept that assumes there is a path that can be followed in order to pursue a more perfect mankind. It stems from the belief that ambiguity and difference are negative forces, to be eliminated instead of embraced.

I think the argument is that the darker historical paths were 'simulation' where 'emulation' would be a better model. The difference (from what I could tell) being that the underlying mechanism of cultural change are copied, instead of just the effects. It could be argued that this is already taking place - the massive reach of the internet is expanding so that more people are being influenced by the same information streams. Internet culture makes the assumption, predictably, that internet culture is good/best. But what if that isn't true? What about those who don't fit into the 'internet' cultural norms?

The author talks of of making subjective judgements about the optimal performance of certain cultures. That's a bit problematic. What about the cultures that are not "optimal performers"? What is optimal? Those who work the most hours? Those who laugh the most? Those who have the least number of fistfights? Those with the greatest GDP?

schoen• 12 years ago

An interesting counterpoint to this which is less radical but still potentially quite controversial is Kwame Anthony Appiah's view in his book Cosmopolitanism (which I'm reading right now): it's important that cultures get contaminated (by other cultures), and it's important that cultures change.

Edit: here's a version of his argument from that book which he published in the New York Times in 2006.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/01/magazine/01cosmopolitan.ht...

phkahler• 12 years ago

It's always a bummer when someone offers a counterexample to his own point. Here we see: >> I recently wrote an essay: What India can Teach to the World and it basically explains how certain elements from the indian culture could improove any individual in the world.

While he holds up 3 other cultures as being closest to optimum without explanation, he also suggests that they could benefit from elements of another. This naturally leads to a more evolutionary way where differentiation allows exploration of many elements which can then be adopted by others once they're identified as "good" whatever that means.

tjradcliffe• 12 years ago

Cultural homogeneity is anti-Bayesian.

According to the Gospel of Bayes, evidence can only be used to update pre-existing beliefs. If we consider any individual issue, no matter what beliefs we start with, sufficient evidence will move all of us toward a similar endpoint. So for example as infants we likely start with some pretty weird hypothetical ideas, and by a roughly Bayesian process move toward common notions like object permanence.

Since it is provable that Bayesian updating is the only way of knowing that is consistent, there is no magic short-cut to optimal answers, which means that a population with diverse starting points is in general going to have a few members that reach optimality fairly promptly while the rest of us are still flailing around.

If we view cultures as systems for solving problems, this implies that cultural diversity will tend to get us to better solutions to those problems sooner than homogeneity. Nor will the same culture always be the fastest to currently optimal solution: the recent upsurge in interest in Buddhist psychology is an example of a culture that achieved a pretty good understanding of the mind quite a long time ago.

By giving us a framework in which to understand the value of cultural diversity--including linguistic diversity--while at the same time placing the universality of Bayes' Rule at the centre of the knowing subject's experience, Bayesianism allows us to resolve the tension in Enlightenment humanism between a) valuing the unique and diverse forms of human expression, culture, language, etc and b) insisting there are universal principles that unite all humanity.

humanrebar8• 12 years ago

And Bayesian is a form of ethnocentrism... one that presumes that materialism and induction are superior, or at least inevitable, paths to knowledge and truth.

Bayesian thought also presumes clear criteria for comparing outcomes, or at least suitable heuristics that meet the same ends. Real life is much more complex and every individual, at least to some degree, is responsible for judging right from wrong, determining efficient from inefficient, and even applying meaning to continuous reality (as opposed to discrete experiments).

...Bayesianism allows us to resolve the tension in Enlightenment humanism...

Sure. Again, if you assume a materialist philosophy. But there are philosophies that are inherently at odds with that worldview, including philosophies that are inherently incompatible with the form of Bayesianism you're describing here. So maybe there's a Gordian knot that has been cut here, but it's not the only Gordian knot by any means.

kazinator2• 12 years ago

Yeah, we will have better human welfare if we become a huge homogenized mass. The evidence of better human welfare will be, why better economic output. Because that's what welfare means: all the cogs meshing together and cranking it out.

Out of this homogenized mass will emerge innovation, supposedly. I suppose it will have to, just to beat the stupefying boredom. Of course, it will be frowned upon. "Just what the heck do you think you're doing there with that innovation of yours? You wouldn't happen to be trying to start a new kind of geographically-identifiable behavior around your invention? Dare I say... culture? You know that is forbidden!"

By the way, English is the most spoken language? Not really; it's probably the most badly abused language, for the purposes of global trade. You have to look at other measures, like for how many is it their mother language. In how many places is new English-language literature being produced (not only business documents like purchase orders). A halfway meaningful count might be: how many moms sing English lullabies to their children.

You know, in most places, people guard their language and culture very jealously. The use of another language by a few people who have jobs with international ties doesn't constitute any evidence that their region is converting to another culture.

JamilD• 12 years ago

When we arrive at one homogeneous culture, who do we emulate to improve ourselves? How can we be sure that of two competing ideas, one is better?

Competition and contrast between cultures is what enables us to improve. The world wants to copy Silicon Valley, but during its inception it was (and to some extent, it still is) a highly iconoclastic culture.

We can not engineer an ideal society by picking and choosing aspects of different cultures, homogenizing them, and implementing it globally. It will be imperfect -- and we will have no way to improve.

narag• 12 years ago

What I would like to see disappear is the belief that traditions, languages and customs have an intrinsic value and must be preserved. Some languages are only spoken by one person: let them die already. Is your terrible local folklore and music being forgotten? Great!

Edit: It was humbling how Asimov put it in the Foundation saga. In just a few thousands years, memory of Earth had been lost.

NhanH3• 12 years ago

This is a amazingly US-centric essay, and sadly, one that lacks much substance (for the type of claims it's making). There wasn't anything to back up the claim, except the one example on calendar (which pretty much is NOT culture).

Firstly, a quick fact-checking: depends on how you do your survey, English might not be the most used spoken language in the world, and in some cases, not even close. There are somewhere potentially around 1-1.2 billions Mandarin speakers. And if I'm not mistaken, there are around 800-1billions English speakers in the world.

I'd also like to note that your main thesis is a hypothesis at best, and definitely not an "important truth". Not yet, as of today anyway.

Culture existed for a reason. It was not entirely historical accident that the Eastern and Western culture was different (I believe it's partly due to the farming method at the start of agriculture). With that in mind, it's only possible to have a mono culture if the living situation everywhere on Earth is the same. And until we can actually do terraforming, I don't see it happening. (After terraforming? I'd rather not guess). Remember the picture of the worldmap that note half of the world is living in a circle [0]? Even something as simple as most of South-East Asia living in cities would make a drastic different culture than sub-urban America.

I've been thinking about culture and social norms, my conclusion was that they exist as a way to make dealing with other human easier: we human if left alone all have different preferences in too many things. And if as a group, everyone has to guess how everyone else want things to be done, it just take too much effort. That's also why I think when the group is small enough, or if it's a 1-on-1 situation, social norms don't mean much.

Since human ourselves is extremely unlikely to suddenly become homogeneous (5000 years from now, if we a group of human randomly, half of them will probably still put the toilet paper roll differently than the other half), it's more likely that there will be even more culture than the past, not less. If once culture were limited by physical distance, that won't be an issue in the future.

It's more likely than not I'm similar to thinking and belief of other HN-ers than my fellow countrymen - and likewise for other HN-ers.

Finally, efficiency isn't the only goal to be optimized for human/ society. I'm not even sure if that's the main goal or not. Likewise for happiness - we're not all utilitarian, are we?

[0] http://io9.com/more-than-half-of-the-worlds-population-lives...

humanrebar8• 12 years ago

I'd also like to note that your main thesis is a hypothesis at best, and definitely not an "important truth". Not yet, as of today anyway.

Given the parameters of Thiel's question, any good answer is generally a hypothesis and not a definitive proof. Though I suppose a patented solution to the travelling salesman problem would get your company funded.

NhanH3• 12 years ago

Of course there is no such thing as "objective truth", the best we have right now is "peer-reviewed truth". But that claim is so far from even what I'd call an "subjective truth".

tokenadult• 12 years ago

Mandarin (a language I speak) does not have as many speakers as you guess.[1] We can be absolutely sure that the number of people in the world conversant in Mandarin is strictly less than the current population of China by hundreds of millions of individuals.

[1] http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2007-03/07/content_5812838...

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-23975037

NhanH3• 12 years ago

China is a huge country though. At 1.3 billions population, 70% is a solid 900 millions speakers, add in a bit out of country and it's not inconceivable for the number to reach a billion or more.

Either way, it's just a technical details that doesn't affect much of my original point: I don't believe it's a clear cut case of "We have pretty much agreed upon the English language". In EU and of course US, that claim might hold some water. But when it comes to the rest of the world ... that seems far from being settled (And I don't know what's the situation in Africa, or South America is).

abandonliberty2• 12 years ago

Yes, the article is a huge non sequitur.

The most important part with all these interview-style questions is not WHAT the answer is, but HOW you answer it. The question essentially is "share something non-obvious with me I don't agree with." The author is missing the point of that question, which is what makes it a good question.

Ironic that an essay about cultural standardization lacks essay format standardization.

dlwj• 12 years ago

I think Robert Pirsig's concepts of Static Quality and Dynamic quality are a more useful model to view culture.

The world that is advocated here is pure dynamic quality, with nothing to latch onto and preserve static quality.

"Goodness" and "Badness" only exist in retrospect, diversity is needed for survival. Global optimal state doesn't exists.

When people strive for global optimal state, most of the time they are actually looking to create a more legible system. That is, a mechanical system over an organic one. But just because you understand more about how a system works doesn't make it "better".

GFK_of_xmaspast2• 12 years ago

Eine Welt Eine Sprache Eine Kulture

gpvos• 12 years ago

He's probably right that, in order to have world peace, the world must become boring.

pavelrub• 12 years ago

The underlying assumption of this entire post is that "economic, innovation and productivity performance" is the most important thing in the world. Yet this "belief" in itself is nothing but a product of the culture the author lives in. There is nothing universal about it, nor is there any real reason to agree with it. Personally I couldn't care less about "efficiency" if it means things that I consider beautiful - such as the diversity in the world - has to go away.

It's important that cultures disappear

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