P A N

the bit that comes after the line about fighting nature is basically just describing why and how we are effectively fighting the patterns of nature. it has much to do with the leaders of the world following through with very well thought-out plans to basically enslave us. you can see that it is working on all levels if you do your research, in my mind the most basic and obvious evidence being that we actually accept the way food and products are made. we vote with every dollar we spend.

and by "fighting nature" i also mean the inherent "learning curve" (for lack of a better term) of all biological species being stymied by the archaic approaches we humans take to systematizing life on this planet. we're not learning to deal with anything. we just make it worse, everyday. but a new meaning has been created for individuality for the people of earth, and i'd say it's more closely tied to the ego in the sense that to be an individual is now achieving a sense of success in this capitalist era, rather than seeing yourself, just like a squirrel or an elephant or even just a tiny cell, as a functioning player in a system that goes way beyond dollars and status and into being a functioning and integral component in the system of the quantum world. which is, of course, the only world which is truly alive.

and whether you like to hear it or not, we're all effectively quite brainwashed, and somebody's "predicted outcome" at that. they have designed collective thinking so as to compensate for the derivatives of evil.

i could go on forever about this.

cultural evolution vs(/+) human evolution: just like all living things, we evolve. some people seem to find the need to debate this, but it's undeniable. to me the most basic approach is to see cultural evolution and human evolution as sort of gravitationally binary, meaning one can't function/happen without the other. again to the learning curve.

if you look at the learning curve of the world's people instead of as divided culturally into sections where one group is more "intelligent" or informed or technically swift than another group, but rather just as the sheer achievements of man, as in the first wheel and creating fire at will all the way to today's sciences and discoveries and technologies, and put the instances of those discoveries on a timeline graph, you'll see that the information available to us grows exponentially.

our achievements in the arena of thought literally CREATE the world in which we live. so as cultural and human evolution are tied, the environment which we create is the one which we have no choice but to adapt to.

the dawn of the internet was inevitable, and it serves as the only medium or substrate that a global culture can (and inevitably will, as the learning curve demonstrates) can flourish.

the only problem is, we all speak different languages.

one other thing, there are leaps and bounds being made in translation technology and in the next 2-3 years you will see cell phones equipped with near-instantaneous audio converters for many languages. i would say this is evidence of demand for global unity.

duga

I agree with a lot of what you said, but I just want to point out there is a big difference between a country claiming it is "melting pot" and actually being one. Sure, people from all over the world immigrate here, but are generally expected to live out life as an "American". I hear way too often that Mexican immigrants need to learn to speak "American". The general population of this country is not concerned with other cultures in the least, save for the few open minded folk I meet.

That being said, I think the language argument is the least of our problems. I think having a global language will do nothing but help...it needs to happen, in my opinion. Maybe some people are upset that that language may be English, but that is just the way history went. What is dangerous is the business and economics side of things. American companies expand into foreign markets and as a result, many cultures are diluted.

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TheBig3

I don't mean this as a jab but no one is accusing Indiana of being a melting pot. You're too far in there. But America certainly is. And while some demand "Mexican immigrants speak American" you're talking about a smaller group of people there that are likely frustrated, and unaware of their own ignorance.

If they say "talk American" then I don't know what to say other than they don't know the rules of, nor the name for, the language they want to Nationalize. While I think it would be smart to learn a language if you're going to live in that country, I'm not worried about it since english is more easily picked up by the generations that follow.

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duga

I have actually been outside of Indiana. The "melting pot" aspect of this country is a very small portion of it. Middle America is all the same as Indiana (I'm talking Illinois, Iowa, Idaho, Ohio, Michigan, etc...exclude the big cities as I find a decent amount of culture there, but also a whole lot of other crap)...maybe by coincidence I missed all the good parts of that region, but I don't think so.

Have you traveled outside the country? That isn't meant to be critical, I'm simply asking. There are more accepting areas of the US, but I won't back down from what I said after living abroad. Once you have that experience, it is easy to see how closed the US is in terms of culture even at their best.

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Neapolitan

I really can not agree with that at all. The US is very open, it has more language spoken and more religions practice then most countries in the world. More parades for more nationalities then anywhere I know of. It's like an open city not a enclosed fortress, people come cross it's borders at will, on a daily basis. I've met a lot of people nationalities and it's amazing how many keep their old prejudices from their old country. So in that way I don't see the US as closed culturally as much as it's a global phenomenon.

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Guybrush

So would you argue that if you take the average pakistani and italian, they are more culturally different when they live in America than when they live in respective countries?

You guys are forgetting to think comparatively. The anglosphere covers a huge geographical area. If you take all that area and impose it on the parts of the world that do not have english as the first language, do you think it would round off an area with more cultural diversity or less? Generally speaking without worrying too much about where you put down the borders, I would think more. You're talking about america and then I think you forget how huge the US is. Many of the countries your immigrants come from could fit inside the same geographical area the US covers.

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TheBig3

They may have more differences because culture would be expressed more here. Its why many americans refer to themselves as Irish, or Mexican, or Italian, or whatever. Its because they have different cultural mores than the guy across the street who has no differences from him other than possibly ancestry.

America doesn't have a standardized version for much of anything. Its entierly possible that some Americans will have more in common with people from other countries than they would with their fellow comuntryman.

We have a woman at work who's originally from utah, and you'd think she was from god damn mars. In fact, I know I have more in common with Tore than I have with her. I don't know if its as explainable as we'd like it to be, but America (I won't speak for other nations) always wants a national identity because our history has cautioned us against one.

I'm telling you man, nothing gives a nation a personality complex like an oppressive monarch.

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Neapolitan

I am not quite clear what you mean by "more cultarally different." I'm not trying to be coy or anything like that. I wouldn't mind to answer that when I know better what you mean, I've seen something else you wrote I choosed to repsond to.

I chosen three aspects where culture could be comparatively discussed.

Culture is ever evolving
In a way you can use an anology of doing:saying::culture:language. Just as someone who studies language he slowly begins to understands that language is always in an evolutionary process - well, culture is like that too. It's always evolving, if you take the Western Culture (America and Europe) and compare any two decades twenty years apart, in some respects it is an entirely different world from each other. The developement of English is very interesting (just as every language) The Angles, the Saxons, the Jutes, the Vikings, the Normans, the loan words from French, scientific names from Latin and Greek all played a part in developing English which has something like a half millions words in it, and that's not a hyperbole. The English language kept the basic things from it's Germanic origin and adopted or adapted words (foreign its origin) throughout its history, some words come in vogue and other words are dropped. Culture is like that you can take group or country and you can see some traditions that go back for generations, and some things that are picked up, or dropped fairly recently.

Culture is interrelated
You can also think of culture almost like Biological classification the taxonomic rank of order falls between kingdom and species, well cultural experience is somewhere between a human experience and a personal experience. A person is a part of a town, a county, a state, country etc and a person is also a part of a family, clan, tribe, race, whatever all the way up to the human race. You can find differences and likenesses between people, family, up to a larger group where collectively it is noticeably a culture.

Culture is stratatified
Sometimes "culture" doesn't have a connotaion of a high-brow culture belongs only to the erudite and oligarchy, and where the lower class are considered uncultured. The demographics of America could be divided by wealth, education, location, race, ethnic background, Big3's post above basicly says everything I was going to say here.

Back to your original question, it's a difficult question because when you start thinking comparatively you can see how nebulas culture can be. I even forgot my train of thought, ee gads I wanted to tie it together somehow, I definitely had a point somewhere but I lost it.

I guess you are worried that Norway is dropping Norwegian culture and picking up this "coperate" culture of America, film, music, books, tv programs etc -mass media. And this transference of culture is happening differently then it did in the past where people actually meet before they had a cultural exchange and it took time to happen. But its mass media, how much of it is fact or fiction? How much of it is a personal, a human, experience being portrayed vs. something strictly American?

Weren't there common threads between ethnic groups culturally long before the modern age of mass media? And who is control of mass media, and do they have their own agenda?

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boo boo

In some ways, the free trade economy allows different countries to learn customs from other countries and this can make way for interesting new subcultures, trends and forms of art and entertainment. I'm all for that.

However, it seems like the only countries that have this kind of influence throughout the world are the industrial giants and biggest exporters. Namely Japan, China, UK and the US.

There's no reason for underdeveloped countries to be so exposed to American culture without learning as many things about the rest of the world. Media tends to project the image that the more economically powerful a country is, the more cultural significance it should have and will have throughout the rest of the world.

Obviously it's very unfair, and I do agree that it should be a primary objective for every nation to preserve their culture. I'm not saying it's a terrible thing that there are Burger Kings in Bombai, because that's really no different from having foreign restaurants in America... well maybe that's not entirely true, for one foreign restuarants tend to be small businesses and usually run by people who are actually part of the culture, which isn't quite the same as a mega fast food chain.

But anyway, the concern begins when elements of our culture actually starts to replace a countries own traditions, and there's no denying that this is happening right now. There's no real way of stopping it either.

Still, America embraces so many cultures from around the world (despite all the bigoted dumbsh*t politicians and exploitive corporations who have earned us our bad reputation with foreign nations) it's a land of immigrants after all, our culture is just one big clusterf*ck of all the other cultures in the world, and with free trade on the rise it only makes sense that eventually the whole world will be like this.

Anyway, I personally don't think anyone is capable of truly understanding what it's like to live in another country unless they have been there, but even then they would only have a vague understanding of the lives of those who live there.

So I don't claim to know anything about any country outside of America, hell, I don't claim to really know anything that goes on outside of my f*cking state. I would love to travel the world someday.

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Guybrush

Brilliant post, Boo.

Neapolitan, you seem to know what this thread is about. I live in Norway which seems to be losing some of it's cultural uniqueness. Some of what we have is getting replaced by what you have. Almost nothing of what we have is getting replaced with what you have. Did you ever eat a norwegian meal? Heard any norwegian music that wasn't commercial pop? This is an influence from the media, we're influenced by what is shown to us - regardless of how much culture you really do have, this is something which is happening.

The question I posted whether you think an american italian or pakistani are more culturally diverse in america than if they lived in Italy and Pakistan respectively. Would they have more or less in common? Some of the arguments here make it seem like if you take an italian and put him in America, the US now contains pure italian culture. Even though almost all americans were originally immigrants, I don't think all have perfectly preserved their cultural identity from the country they hail from. With each generation, it waters out. I know my own family in the US haven't perfectly retained their cultural identity. They enjoy and are proud of their norwegian heritage, but they're very much americans.

I think being american, it's harder for you to understand what I'm actually writing about. I'm in Norway saying we're becoming more like you guys (people from the anglosphere in a general sense). You're in America saying what .. that we don't?

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