High culture: Saturn eats his son (Source: here)
Culture is a broad concept comprising the ideas, customs, and social behaviour of a people or society. It encompasses arts, beliefs, and institutions, which, while dynamic, are often passed down the generations.
Culture finds expression in codes of conduct, manners, dress, language, class, cuisine, caste, religion, rituals, and creative arts, such as painting, literature, music, and sculpture.
Beneath these expressions lies a shared set of values, which allows culture to act like a glue that unites people around a collective identity.
Sharing values and a collective identity engender familiarity and trust, which in turn contributes to the maintenance of order and security among members of the culture, for example by creating a sense of safety in numbers.
For this reason, culture is also very closely linked to politics, which explains why governments in many countries overtly sponsor cultural celebrations, museums, and the academic study of culture via the formal disciplines of archaeology, social anthropology, classics, music, sculpture, painting, the history of art, and others.
Due to the pleasures generated by the arts as well as the sense of community associated with belonging to a culture, it is common for people to automatically assume that culture is an unambiguously positive thing.
Yet, culture has extreme dark sides, which are usually given far less recognition. This note aims to highlight the dark aspects of culture and future notes in this series will explore the dark side of culture in greater depth.
The dark side of culture manifests itself both at the level of the individual and at population level. Individual members of cultures tend to incur a loss of freedom by having to operate within a defined set of acceptable social or religious parameters consistent with the culture's common values. These parameters are typically enforced by the community itself, somtimes even by the government. An extreme example is how women are required to dress and act in Afghanistan under the Taliban.
Scandinavian culture restricts the freedom of individuals in order to achieve cultural ideals. Scandinavian culture places greater value on equality than, say, American culture, but the attainment of greater equality requires economic penalties on individuals, who are forced to pay more tax in order to enable the state to take care of the less well-off. Scandinavia has been able to sustain taxation at a higher levels than in the United States over very long periods of time (decades rather than years), which shows that this way of addressing inequality has broad social acceptance. Broad societal acceptance notwithstanding, there is clearly a cost to the individual tax payer.
At population level, strong cultural identity often manifests itself in mistrust of, collective ignorance about, and prejudice about members of other cultures. Indeed, non-conformists and/or members of minority cultures are often discriminated against or entirely ostracised in countries with strong dominant cultures. The tendency for cultures to be mistrustful of other cultures is easily exploited for political purposes and can lead to very bad outcomes.
The dark sides of culture - loss of individual freedom and persecution of minorities - are almost never given the same recognition as the many good sides of culture. This is because societies are loath to criticise their own practices. Culture is so integral to many peoples’ sense of identity that to criticise one’s own culture is almost like aiming criticism at one self.
To the contrary, it is often entirely socially acceptable for members of a dominant culture to criticise other cultures. You do not need to take many journeys on a public bus in, say, Copenhagen before you hear overtly Islamophobic conversations, even in the presence of Muslims. A strong anti-Islamic element has made its way into Danish culture over the past few decades, to the extent that it is now socially acceptable to make public utterances about Muslims that would not have been out of place in Nazi Germany in the late 1930s had they been made about Jews.
Discrimination against members of alien cultures is pervasive in the Western societies as well as in many other parts of the world. Culture-based discrimination shows up in the mistreatment of women, ostracisation of ethnic and religious minorities, unfair treatment of the youngest as well as the oldest, the disabled, and the less educated.
Culture-based discrimination is particularly rife in the labour market. Take the banal example of the priesthood, a truly culture-based profession. To this day, it is official policy of the Catholic Church to not ordain women as priests. Yet, women work as pastors in other branches of Christianity, including the Lutheran Church and other protestant denominations. The chauvinism against women within the Catholic Church can only be classified as culture-based discrimination.
Culture-based discrimination is costly. Labour markets that discriminate on cultural grounds are not economically efficient. By failing to allocate jobs according to talent, they are by definition inefficient. A number of studies have sought to quantify the cost to society of discrimination. And the cost is truly staggering. Take the 2016 study from the OECD, which estimated gender-based discrimination alone costs the world some USD 12 trillion, or 16% of global income GDP (see here). A 2021 Harvard University study of the cost of racism towards Black Americans put the cost at USD 800bn per annum, or about 3.5% of 2021 US GDP (See here). A 2020 study of racism by Citibank reached a similar conclusion (See here).
Of course, the true costs of culture-based discrimination are even greater in reality, because economic studies do not factor in non-quantifiable costs such as the victims’ sense of humuliation, alienation, and broken dreams. Moreover, culture-based discrimination has produced some of the worst human rights abuses, wars, and genocides known to man. Culture-based attrocities are often perpetrated with the formal backing of churches and/or state institutions due to the ease with which politicians and religious leaders exploit culture to generate popular backing for persecutions of minorities. Examples of horrific culture-based atrocities with strong state/church/popular backing include:
Catholics and Protestants killed upwards of 8 million people during the Thirty Years’ War in the name of religion.
Adolf Hitler and the Nazis killed some 6 million Jews after making the case for their extermination with surprisingly little pushback from a German population humiliated after World War I and the Treaty of Versailles.
Upwards of 25 million Asians were victimised based on Japan’s ideas of cultural superiority during World War II.
Hindus and Muslims committed multiple genocides on each other due to religious differences during the post-independence Partition of the Indian Dominion.
Pol Pot’s genocide in Cambodia led to the deaths of 2 million people in the name of Maoism and Nationalism.
Hutu leaders in Rwanda induced ordinary people to murder a million Tutsis in the mid-1990s on ethnic grounds.
In 2016-17, the military of Myanmar exploited ethnic and cultural divisions to inflict genocide against the Rohingya minority, with broad popular backing from other sections of Myanmar society, including Nobel Peace Prize winner Ang San Suu Kyi.
Culture-based persecutions in varying degrees of intensity are taking place every day. During his first term as president of the United States, Donald Trump introduced policies to remove children from migrants mothers from Central America. Such a policy would have amounted to political suicide had it been applied to Americans. European Union (EU) member states and the United Kingdom openly discriminate against refugees from Africa, but favour Ukrainian refugees, because the culture of the latter is more similar Western European culture (for more on EU's immigration policy see here).
Western tolerance of the Israeli genocide in Gaza is also largely cultural. The Israeli hatred of Palestinians has, so far, resulted in the death of some 40,000 Palestinians in Gaza, most of whom are innocent women and children. In today’s context, such a genocide would never have been tolerated had the victims been Jews or Christians, but because European and US prejudice against Muslims is now so strong the IDF is allowed to commit attrocities every single day without as much as drawing criticism, let alone condemnation and sanctions from the West.
There is probably not any culture on Earth, which has not at some point perpetrated horrendous attrocities against members of other cultures. Whenever culture is invoked in conflict, the outcomes tend to be particularly gruesome with features such as horrific torture, indiscriminate targeting of civilians, genocide, mass rapes, and ethnic cleansing. When culture is invoked in conflict any killing of a fellow member of the culture becomes personal, because participants assume cultural rather than individual identities and therefore act to revenge all the victims in their own culture, by attacking all members of the offending culture.
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Given culture’s enormous costs to individuals and societies alike, in peacetime as in war, it would be desirable to be able to identify specific conditions under which culture’s darkest sides manifest themselves. If the dark sides of culture are simply intrinsic to culture itself thrn there may not be much we can do about it. On the other hand, if the dark sides of culture are somehow coaxed into existence then there may be ways to curb the worst excesses.
My view is that membership of a culture pre-disposes people towards discrimination, but that it usually takes the active involvement of people in power - political leaders and church leaders in particular - for culture to turn monstrous. I explore the interaction of culture and politics in the 3rd instalment of this series (see here), but before going there I will first explore how culture evolved in the first place and how human cultures became so distinct from one another. This is the topic of the next instalment of The Dark Side of Culture (see here).
The End
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