Civilisation, Culture, and Defiance Part 3

This Stuff Is Everywhere

If you want to get a better understanding of how widespread this simple problem is, you only have to look at points of conflict around the globe. When people are insisting on preservation of their culture, there is always much defiance against what is considered 'civilised'. Sometimes we don't say it out loud, but whenever you hear of somebody complaining about other people's cultural practices being 'barbaric', you can be fairly certain that what that person is pushing is civilisation as a universal value. 

Don't get me wrong - I like civilisation. Yet I can see how that falls on deaf ears to those who are wedded to their culture. It's do-or-die time when civilisation comes knocking and tells you to surrender your cultural practices. If your thing is bagging a bunch of baby seals and clubbing them or keeping mink in cages and then skinning them for fur coats, the civilised world is going to come at you hard. And you will be saying ""but this practice is deep and old in my culture. All the same, civilisation won't have a bar of it. 

So, don't get me wrong, I do have sympathy for the cultural practices of the peoples of this planet - but I do draw the line at marching with Nazi flags or Confederate flags and retrograde monsters trying to sneak through racism and anti-semitism as something acceptable. If you can't tell you're on the side of assholes-in-history and act accordingly, then you don't get much sympathy from me. 

The reality is everybody picks and chooses their moment to side with civilisation and then culture. People act according to their interests in a very Machiavellian way. It's the kind of sad wisdom that comes from having seen too much. A young person ought to get used to that and learn not to judge too harshly. 

On Why Whaling Is A Terrible Battleground

Here's an example of the defiant cultural shibboleth that just won't die. 

There used to be a lot of countries that used to do commercial whaling. Then, in the 1980s, there was a sea change of public opinion about whether people really should be doing this stuff any more. The process of civilisation had arrived to a rather brutal 19th century kind of industry. The International Whaling Commission which used to decide which countries were allowed to catch how many tonnes of whale, suddenly grew this higher consciousness and decided that all commercial whaling should be banned. And so commercial whaling came to an official end. 

As we know there are a number of holdout nations - Japan, Norway, Iceland, and Russia.  Of the 4 countries, Japan was perhaps the most vocal about its desire to re-commence commercial whaling. At the core of its defiant attitude towards the prevailing winds of banning all commercial whaling was a belief that whaling is a cultural practice in Japan. When we pick a little bit at Norway and Iceland's commitment towards whale hunting, you hit a similar kind of bedrock belief that catching whale for food was, and should remain a part of their lives. If you talk to them, they don't see why you living in some country that has anything and everything in your supermarkets, gets to tell them what they can and cannot eat. 

As I pointed out in the previous entry, the cultural argument is implicitly bolstered with defiance precisely because that's how culture works - by being defiant. Over the years, the Anglophone nations have spent considerable rhetorical energy in a bid to stop Japan (and to a lesser extent Norway and Iceland) from their commercial whaling. Most of the time, those attempts fell on deaf ears, and it only resulted in ever more occasions for the Japanese whaling fleet to go sailing the open seas. 

Even the ICJ case which deemed the scientific whaling was actually commercial whaling in disguise resulted in Japan withdrawing from the IWC. Japan declared her whaling fleet would not go whaling in the Southern Oceans near the antarctic. Instead the fleet would whale within Japan's territorial waters. The point is, they're not going to stop because in their paradigm, it is in their culture to go whaling, and we know this by the very ferocity of the defiance. Maybe the gentle hand of civilisation will come to the Japanese eventually, but right now, the world has spent 40 years making it a matter of culture. It didn't set out to do so, but that's kind of where it has ended up. 

Why The Cultural Argument Isn't Always Great

This leads me to the next point. Mounting a defence over an action or practice based on culture is actually widespread. The "we do 'X' because it is our custom to do so" has tremendous sway all over the globe. If the cultural practice argument comes from an indigenous person, we the civilised colonisers are inclined to back right off from whatever is triggering their defiance. Most of the time, we play it cool and try not to invoke the defiance of the cultural defenders. It's the polite thing to do, it's the right thing to do. 

I have a friend Roddy who is half Samoan and he once said to me "mate, the cultural argument is not so good, eh? Like Samoans used to eat people as their culture. You can't really be saying to other people that it's okay to eat people because it's part of your culture. Some things are just wrong. Eating people is wrong".

Like I said before, the process of being Civilised demands we draw some firm lines somewhere. 

On Why Civilisation Can Be Bad Too

As Australia Day/Invasion Day rolled around again this year, and the debates get more strident every year. On the one side is the default/conservative position that the arrival of the white colonisers is worthy of celebration. Set against that is the indigenous voice that says it was a horrible invasion, an undeclared, unwarranted act of war followed by genocide. As history goes, so goes the narrative, and with the narrative go all the judgments so in many ways the rancour has to do with the representation of historic events. 

If you're not white like me, and therefore not of the demographic that claims kinship with the first fleet colonists, it's a little more abstract. Historically speaking, we don't get to come to Australia without the events of 1788 onwards. The problem with Australia is that the civilisation that came hand in hand with colonialism totally washed over the continent like a tidal wave. It did a lot of damage and washed away lives. There is nothing but the defiance of indigenous people to offer up resistance to this civilisation. 

The civilisation that has covered itself all over Australia is at once optimistic and exploitative. Whether it is Macarthur and his flock of merinos, or the gold rush, or the deep mines we have cut into the land, the process of civilisation as has transpired in Australia is brutally efficient at exploitation of natural resources and brooks no dissent; all of this was/is in exchange for ever more material wealth. Yet we find so much hope in the material wealth we can exploit from this land. This process is so much so, the best way to understand the Australian economy is as a quarry, shearing shed, and abattoir. 

Culture does not really come into Australian life much. I think it might be a land of philistines. Sydney is never going to be like New York. Melbourne is never going to be like London. Brisbane is always going to be a provincial, parochial, country town. As for the other capital cities of Australia, the less said the better. Australia is the land where Toynbee's Civilisation has smashed David Graeber's Culture. In Australia, culture lost, still loses everyday, and will keep losing out to the process of civilisation - getting beaten up, pretty much like a punching bag. 

And it is against this monolithic wonder that is modern civilisation with no real concern for culture, that the Indigenous people are defiantly raising their flag. If you don't have some sympathy for that, you have no heart, and most likely you are one of the many philistines. For the record, that is not a good thing.