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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31065 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 16, 2023

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I envy European and Asian cultures who in many cases have many thousands of years of folk tales and traditions to draw from

Currently being displaced and destroyed by the American commercially-produced folk-culture substitute. It's really sad to me, but that's a culture war that has already been lost. The American mass-produced substitute not only is several billion-dollar industries, but it's also designed to reflect the current social and material conditions. Meanwhile, the conditions that sustained actual folk cultures around the world, such as peasant life in most of Southern Europe, have disappeared or are disappearing, leaving the original traditions void of most of their former meaning. We are left, for example, with American neo-traditions which are usually centered around spending money. But the local traditions have lost their original meaning, so even where they are still practiced, they only can be either a tourist attraction or a LARP (or both).

To give you an idea of how pervasive this is, even traditions that don't depend so much on their meaning, such as tales for children, have been displaced by mass culture substitutes. For example, where I live most of the traditional tales have been completely forgotten, displaced by the Grimm Brothers in the best case (at least still based on a tradition from somewhere) and Disney or books like "X has two daddies" in the worst and more common one.

Currently being displaced and destroyed by the American commercially-produced folk-culture substitute. It's really sad to me, but that's a culture war that has already been lost. The American mass-produced substitute not only is several billion-dollar industries, but it's also designed to reflect the current social and material conditions. Meanwhile, the conditions that sustained actual folk cultures around the world, such as peasant life in most of Southern Europe, have disappeared or are disappearing, leaving the original traditions void of most of their former meaning. We are left, for example, with American neo-traditions which are usually centered around spending money. But the local traditions have lost their original meaning, so even where they are still practiced, they only can be either a tourist attraction or a LARP (or both).

Absolutely. My grandfather knew most of Goethe and Schiller by heart. Dropping a line out of their works in an appropriate context both got a laugh out of everyone and it fostered a shared understanding of belonging to the same culture. Of belonging to the in-group.

That has first been replaced by sit-com catchphrases ("Bazinga", "true story") and now by memes. Which, to channel my inner old man yelling at clouds (itself a cringey Simpsons reference), is just really lame.

And you Yanks are the worst. You wouldn't recognise a Shakespeare quote if it bit you in your very Cs, your Us and your Ts.

That's really disturbing to me and I'm sorry to hear your culture is going through that. I've always loved traveling and the pervasiveness of globalization is super depressing to me when I visit other countries. As an American I feel terrible that exporting our power and values bulldozes everyone else's.

To be charitable I try to also look at what the American cultural exports offer to people though- in many cases people's lives are improved by adopting new technologies and opening their borders to international trade and so on. You have to accept people's agency and their own right to choose to have their culture molded to fit international standards even though I don't think a lot of people do, or even can, consider thoroughly the negative effects of this in the long run. I mean, that's what I have to tell myself to keep from going crazy, haha.

Yes, I'm not laying blame into the American mass-produced culture, or at least not exclusively. It fills the void left after traditions lose their meaning, and in a case-by-case basis it is indeed voluntarily accepted. But it does a terrible job at filling that void (to the extend that it fills anything at all) and there are few, if any, non LARPy alternatives to adopting it. When the roots die the whole tree dies as well, and it's only normal that fungi grow in the rotting mass. But it's still sad that the tree is no longer there.

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