A Little Something About Culture
In the time I wasn't blogging, I spent a lot of time just surfing YouTube. One of the things I came across was David Graeber giving a short talk about what 'culture' actually is, and how culture might not be your friend, so to speak. Graeber's talk hones in fast on saying culture is defiance. He gives some anthropological anecdotes that delineate the notion that culture comes from the desire to differentiate one's own group from another set of people, with a good deal of defiance.
Up to that moment I saw the video, I was operating under an older consideration which I got from Arnold Toynbee whereby Toynbee said habits, memes, methods and objects that allow themselves to be transported across peoples is the essence of civilisation. Things that do not lend themselves to be transported across peoples, is culture. That's pretty abstract, but the example I like giving is this: you can experience sushi anywhere because serving raw fish on rice with vinegar is something that has traveled all over the globe. If you live in any Australian metropolitan area, there is some place that serves up sushi. If you're not Japanese, this is perfectly fine - the food being served is sushi, well enough.
However, if you are Japanese, then this food being served is far from the proper cultural practice of what sushi is, and how it should be served. A proper cultural experience of sushi is if you had it served to you by a Japanese chef in Tsukiji, Tokyo, right near where the fish markets used to be. It will cost you a pretty penny, around a thousand dollars for two people - and you have to settle the account in cash. In other words, it has to have the right time, place, people, materials, and atmosphere. The entire practice cannot be transported, and so we can see sushi properly served, is a deeply cultural practice. And Japanese people will tell you with defiance, you can't take that experience out to some shopping centre in say, Chatswood, NSW, Australia and call it proper sushi. What you get in Chatswood is some blonde girl working her summer job, serving up sushi made by a machine in plastic containers! (gasp, horror) It's sushi, Jim, but not as the cultured Japanese know it. As experiences go it ain't bad, but the connoisseur of culture says it's an ersatz experience, tainted by the wrong place, people and ingredients.
And that, in a nutshell is Graeber's point. If you look around the globe, all kinds of people are doing things in the name of culture, and most of the time, it's in defiance of the other. "That's not real tequila", "That's not real salami", "That's not how you sew a quilt" and so on and on it goes. Quite often, 'the other' being defied is the Hegemony of Western civilisation which brings technology, the flattening of social hierarchies, reification of values, and porn. The people who bang on the most about their culture or some sovereignty derived from culture are the people who stand to lose the most social power within their society should the process of civilisation further erode their social status within those societies.
So in short, Toynbee says Civilisation is what goes around the world and Culture is what stays put. Graeber says Culture stays put because it's an act of defiance. Graeber says a lot more in the video but for today's point, that's the salient bit.
What's Wrong With Civilisation Then?
Now, here's the bad news. There is plenty wrong with civilisation as we experience it today. The process of civilisation is such that it destroys entire eco-systems in order to exist. There is something manic about the power of civilisation to travel the globe and deliver things on demand, disregarding its costs.
Yet when I rhetorically ask, "what's wrong with civilisation?" I'm not going to talk about those sorts of issues. I want to talk more about the reaction of people who encounter it, without having invited it.
Civilisation historically arrived with colonisers. This is not limited to the European expansion into the world starting with Columbus, but also Rome into Gaul, Germania and Britain. That process is the entire point of 'Heart of Darkness' by Joseph Conrad. Everywhere people went with better technology enabled them to outcompete the local population for survival. We may even look at colonialism and the spread of technological civilisation as effectively interchangeable. But it brings about carnage.
This plays out in a funny way in a place like Australia. On the one hand you have white settlement in Australia backed up by the tremendous technological gap between the British settlers and the indigenous people leading to the defiance we see with indigenous people denouncing Australia Day. Yet you have certain parts of the old White Australian community wanting to join Pauline Hanson's defiance against Asians (in the 90s) and Muslims (this side of 9/11). Australia's ratbag knee-jerk crypto-fascist-right are defying the predominant progressivism, citing a largely imaginary 'Australian culture' which is somehow sacrosanct. It's only sacrosanct because without it, their identity might go up in a puff of smoke.
Civilisation is a process that chips away at your current state of being. Civilisation makes you ponder things about the future where culture would ask you to ponder the past and history. Civilisation asks you to consider changing your ways whereas culture asks you to preserve the old ways. To stand with civilisation, in a sense is inherent to the global process where local cultures get swallowed up by the tidal wave of capitalism - the process whereby the woodland park gets turned into a carpark, or a lookout over a landscape gets a tourist centre and a kiosk that sells tourists a variety of generic food you would never wish to critique. As civilisation washes out culture from our lives, gone are discernment, and aesthetic judgments. Civilisation isn't all good for everybody - it can't be all good for everybody - exactly because it is tied into global capitalism as it was once tied in implicitly with colonialism.
What's Right With Civilisation Then?
That said, it is worth considering what good civilisation is in terms of what it brings about. When you look at progressive causes, a lot of them are to do with equality. Equality is about fairness a lot of the time. Whether that is emancipation of women or recognition of LGBTQ rights, it has a decidedly civilising edge to the simple fact that we make accommodations for fairness. The angry right that snarls at the mere thought of political correctness and censoring freedom of speech and hating on science, to any kind of critical revision of history, basically strikes a pose of defiance agains these simple moves towards progress.
This kind of defiance as cultural credo is at times gently persuasive but more recently we have entered a time when the extreme rhetoric of both sides has obscured the middle ground, right under the incessant footwork of the culture wars. Thus it is quite fitting that David Graeber argued 'Culture' is not your friend. The defiance inherent to cultural positions keeps us from improving a civilised, technological society.
If we can all evolve our consciousness just a little bit, and leave behind notions created in feudal times or the dark ages, maybe we can bring about a true egalitarian utopia without killing the planet or killing lots of people. That's the promise of civilisation. Of course, whether we can actualise it is another story.
All the same I'm writing all this down because I want people to consider who they are and what they hold to with defiance and why. Perhaps they are not as important as a better future. Maybe we all have to realise Culture is not our friend, and find a way forwards with civilisation.
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