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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 28, 2022

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I had the pleasure last night of watching the 2011 documentary Empire of Dust, a Belgian film that explores interactions between a Chinese construction group and local Congolese in rural Congo. I'm sure many of you have seen it - you've certainly seen this meme - but I wanted to bring it up anyway for discussion, as it was a brilliant piece of film-making and very thought-provoking. The whole thing is available free here on Youtube.

The main theme of the documentary is probably cultural differences between Chinese and Congolese workers. The Chinese complain about how the Congolese are lazy, dishonest, and disorganised and are only interested in beer, dancing, and football. We see lots of glimpses of this, with many scenes of Congolese workers just standing around doing nothing, and seriously dysfunctional industry and construction.

On the other hand, the Chinese foreman, Lao Yang, often comes across as grumpy, abrupt, and occasionally inhumane. He rarely smiles, doesn't engage in any playful or friendly conversation that we see, berates locals for their ignorance, and argues with local Congolese about price constantly. His Congolese translator actually addresses this, saying "he may seem like he's grumpy about something, but that's just how he is all the time." The Congolese by contrast seem generally relaxed, amiable, and friendly (though admittedly difficult to work with).

Lao Yang is at his most engaging and humane, it seemed to me, when he was marveling at the old Belgian infrastructure and talking about how devastating it was to see it completely neglected - "Do you have any idea how hard it must have been to build that railway?" On the one hand, he's still scolding his Congolese contact Eddy, but he comes across as a genuine engineer, sad to see great works in decline.

Also striking to me were the physical differences; despite the poverty and (one assumes) malnutrition, the Congolese men were mostly tall and muscular and generally physically impressive, whereas most of the Chinese we see looked comparatively weedy. Again, Lao Yang addresses this, saying something to the effect that "this is a harsh land where only the strongest survive, which is why everyone here is so well built".

I don't have any grand culture wars lessons here, other than the obvious one that culture matters - China and Congo are very different societies, and what works in one may not work in another. It also made me somewhat more pessimistic about West Africa's potential for economic development, though perversely, made me more positively disposed towards its culture. The movie also has some odd coverage of colonialism; there's no real criticism of the Belgians demonstrated (when discussing the Congolese motivations for seeking independence in 1960, Eddy says simply "we wanted to rule ourselves"), and a general sense of missed opportunities at failing to preserve the infrastructure and development left by the Belgians.

In any case, it's a wonderful film, and now I'm on a documentary kick, I'd love to get some more recommendations. Most of the documentaries on Amazon seem to either be fairly introductory science that I already know (e.g., Cosmos stuff) or else have a focus on individual personalities - true crime, famous sportsmen, outrageous personalities, etc.. I enjoy a good tale of real survival, but in general, I'm more interested in films that help expand my knowledge of the world, especially stuff like geopolitics, history, or culture. Would love to hear some suggestions!

Once you take the wide view on culture, you can start to see that stereotypical behaviors of cultures are the result of the pressures of that society. Congolese, Italians and Mexicans are not "lazy", they are optimized for their local culture, which does not reward work nor punish the lack of it. How this interfaces with global sort-of-capitalist economics is uneven at best.

Black culture in the US is likewise poorly suited to producing steady blue collar workers, but really good at producing various entertainers (at lottery-level rates), and extremely vibrant in cultural production/innovation. Black americans have better mental health and general happiness than many other groups, so the question of culture is also a question of what we value.

This is cultural relativism to a point. Cultures are not good nor bad, but they are good/bad for specific things. Jewish/north european/east-asian culture generally produces people well suited to modern mechanized capitalism, so they do well in modern mechanized capitalistic societies. Native american, Hmong, Somali etc. cultures by and large do not. Much of what gets called "structural racism" is in fact merely cultural mismatch to the political and economic realities of the world.

Every culture must follow their own path in responding to modernism/globalism, but some paths lead to better places than others.

One can admire the Chinese/Japanese work ethic, but I'd rather live as an Italian.

Black americans have better mental health and general happiness than many other groups, so the question of culture is also a question of what we value.

In theory.

In practice this question is more and more devolved to the market in the West, so not all cultures are equal.

Given the clear material issues with the black population (e.g. disproportionately high crime and poverty) they're not really a model, in practice. Yes, cultures are good and bad at specific things, but some cultures are good or bad enough at enough of the things we care about that they're seen as exemplars or models as a whole.

There's a lot of slack for personal preference if you consider the GDP per capita of Japan vs. Italy. However, there'll be much less divergence of opinion if it was Japan vs. Congo.

This is the root of American racial dysfunction: there are many cultures that could be said to be a success as a whole in American terms (again: in the market), but black Americans aren't one of them. I don't think any of the "well-off" ethnic groups would trade their place in America's class hierarchy for that of the blacks. Good music and dance is nice and all but it doesn't seem to translate to a lot of the goods we care about. As you say: a tiny percentage of people win that lottery.

I certainly don't mean to imply that all cultures are "equal" in some cosmic sense. Some are just light-years ahead in terms of what outcomes they produce. A very small subset of cultures give us the modern world, the first and only time in human history in which the vast majority of people were not poverty-stricken peasants on the edge of starvation, disease and predation.

I do mean to say directly that even pretty bad cultures are usually that way for a reason, and have their good points that make people want to continue them.

Some cultures just need to die, as they outlive their usefulness. Every time I see someone trying to resurrect some dead language or culture, it's a ridiculous spectacle. Let Welsh go. We don't need it, the Welsh don't need it, words don't all need twelve "l"s in them, there's no point to it. We can all chuckle about it when it's white european native culture being supplanted and driven out of existence by more competitive options, but everyone gets squeamish when it's non-europeans.

There are no hunter-gatherer cultures that can be useful enough to reproduce in the modern day. There's few if any agricultural ones, and the industrial ones are on the block next.

We do, in fact, still need agriculture and industrial production, unlike Hunter-gathering.

Now if you mean traditional subsistence agriculture, yes, that exists for the museum value at best. But the vast majority of the world’s agricultural production is very much needed.

Agricultural production, yes. A culture of agriculture, not at the societal level. Farmers will probably always have a certain amount of professional distinctiveness, but their existence does not really form the backbone of the national culture. They are an incredibly small group in a modern society.

We also maintain certain hunter/gatherer subcultures (from urban foragers to the large number of actual hunters), but they too are more culturally similar to hobbies than they are to societies.

Agriculture pretty much has to take place in certain areas(flat, rural places with good soil and ready access to water), so the idea that farmers will one day not dominate a society of their own- the very nature of agriculture means it doesn’t play very well with other industries nearby- seems simply dumb.