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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   27192 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 11, 2023

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I'm going to go out on a limb and blame colonialism, Yes, really.

There's much the same problem in Ireland. I've often grumbled that we have no sense of the built heritage; we're scrabbling around trying to create tourist spots based on very dodgy grounds (ancient east coast etc.) while we've permitted, or in many cases destroyed, the kind of heritage that would be attractive. Germany and other European countries have pretty little towns (or even cities) where the Old Traditional Buildings are the main attraction, hell even England manages to have the idea of the idyllic villages (where the murder rate is sky-high) as tourist bait.

We don't. We let our towns and cities collapse, and any new building was and is poor copies of Brutalist or modern architecture. 'Development' meant, in the 60s and 70s, knocking down the old buildings and selling on the sites for massive profits.

Part of it definitely is that the attitude was "we lived in thatched cottages when we were peasants without a pot to piss in, but we've moved on from that" since such housing was not seen as quaint 'cottagecore' but stark reminders of poverty and deprivation. In Dublin, the elegant Georgian terraces had become inner-city slums.

But part of it definitely also was because the British being in charge, and being the ones responsible for everything, down to the local landlords, took away initiative from the locals. You had no power to do anything for yourself, so you became used to not doing anything. Somebody else would make those decisions, decide what should and shouldn't be done, what should and shouldn't be repaired and in what manner.

(There's also the folk stories about not being too visibly striving and improving, as that would just jack up your rent; e.g. stories such as the tenant who saved up for years to afford to buy a fine new coat, and one day the agent/landlord himself sheltered in the cottage from a storm; the tenant proudly lent his new coat to the visitor, and the next day it was sent back with a note saying that if he could afford to dress that well he could afford to pay higher rent. The higher rent eventually meant eviction as no, he could not afford it).

Then we got independence, but the same old mindset prevailed: if the gate falls down, just tie it back on with bailing twine to the fencepost. Don't repair crumbing walls and ditches. Knock down, instead of preserving and repairing, the old architecture. Sure, it'll do. It's somebody else's business to worry about that.

I wonder if there is something of the same mindset in Indians post-the Brits? 'Not my job, not my place; someone else will make the decision' and 'oh well it's good enough'.

Being ruled by a culturally distinct elite is not an unusual condition for human societies. It is very much the norm. European colonization simply meant that the culturally distinct elite came from a bit further away. Before the British, India was largely ruled by Islamic-Persian-Mongolic-Turkic elites. You will be hard-pressed to find many corners of the world where this is not the case. At most, the foreign elite just goes native and adapts to local customs after a while.

If you are looking for an explanation of why many modern independent nationalist "democratic" states are such failures, then you should perhaps realize that their current condition is a highly unusual development in history.

There's probably something to that, but it explains too much.

We let our towns and cities collapse, and any new building was and is poor copies of Brutalist or modern architecture. 'Development' meant, in the 60s and 70s, knocking down the old buildings and selling on the sites for massive profits.

Part of it definitely is that the attitude was "we lived in thatched cottages when we were peasants without a pot to piss in, but we've moved on from that" since such housing was not seen as quaint 'cottagecore' but stark reminders of poverty and deprivation. In Dublin, the elegant Georgian terraces had become inner-city slums.

But part of it definitely also was because the British being in charge, and being the ones responsible for everything, down to the local landlords, took away initiative from the locals. You had no power to do anything for yourself, so you became used to not doing anything. Somebody else would make those decisions, decide what should and shouldn't be done, what should and shouldn't be repaired and in what manner.

All of this is true in Britain too, just replace "the British" with "the government". To the extent that beautiful areas remain, it's because rich second-hand homeowners and large landholders were able to stave off the 60s/70s socialists and vandal developers.

I suppose you can rescue it with @2rafa's theory that the British colonised ourselves first. There is something to that. But in general I think it's more unusual to have nice, clean well-maintained spaces than the reverse. You (we) need a theory of upkeep, not a theory of decline.

Do you or @2rafa have a link to the self-colonization post?

I don’t. I do recall suggesting that one of the reasons I think British elites are relatively nonplussed about mass immigration is that they don’t really consider themselves the same people as the native working class and don’t care if they’re replaced by other peoples they’ve ruled over before, but I’m not sure if that’s what they’re referring to.

Sorry, perhaps it was a take from somewhere else. It lines up with

British elites are relatively nonplussed about mass immigration is that they don’t really consider themselves the same people as the native working class and don’t care if they’re replaced by other peoples they’ve ruled over before

so maybe that's why I attributed it to you. The idea is that the ruling method which British elites use at home resembles that which was used in the empire - quelling a restive native population by dividing it (often ethnically) and elevating sympathetic puppets with little real support to speak for each of the tribes. The tribes can then be kept busy fighting among themselves while the rulers make inconsistent promises and play arbiter.

Hong Kong and the US were also British colonies.

The US was a settler-colony while Ireland was more a case of classic imperialism. I think FarNearEverywhere should have mentioned "being (an unwilling) part of an empire" as opposed to "colonialism", as it gets at the core idea better.

Northern Ireland was closer to a settler-colony and has similar issues.

In fact NI has fallen behind the Republic.

https://www.thefitzwilliam.com/p/is-northern-ireland-a-failed-state

In Ireland in general a lot of the best architecture, ie the great houses, was deliberately burned by the IRA.

I do remember going to Ireland as part of a school trip and being pretty confused why Dublin's only Landmark seemed to be the Guinness Brewery.

I don't believe this at all. We were never colonized in Sweden and the exact same thing happened.

Also the British in India (notably unlike Ireland) governed through local elites - they had to given that the Indian Civil Service only employed less than 8000 expats - so the idea that local elites lost their initiative due to the effects of British rule seems implausible.

Yeah. I've always found the movie Lagaan insane where they're holding up the existing monarchial despot as being oppressed by having a layer of British taxation on top of his feudalism. Like I understand in the movie the British are enforcing a brutal tax, but it's not like India having droughts and feudal taxation being harsh are some unique invention of the Anglo.

local elites lost their initiative due to the effects of British rule seems implausible.

Local elites were kept on a short leash; if you got any uppity notions about "hey this is our country and I should be governing on my own behalf, not as the puppet satrap of an overseas empire", you got swatted and the British government stepped in to take over and run the entire enterprise directly, instead of letting a trading company do it.

Yes but in a lot of the satraps the previous running of affairs prior to the British was also some flavor of being a Satrap to the Mughals, Maratha or whoever the hell else. And if you were a peasant it didn't make a huge lick of difference who exactly held the reins of power on account of said reins being about 14 social classes above where you were.

I've got a few friends of very upper-caste Indian extraction, and the complaints about the Raj always rang somewhat hollow to me as the vibe was always very 'For a century there we were only the 2nd highest rung of the ladder, and lived lives of luxury that were somewhat obliged to Anglos' ilk whilst trying to uplift the grievances of commoners as being somehow related to their great grandfather who was the vice-chief minister of Commerce for Bombay and dined mightily off his servants.

That's true of all management all the time. If a mid-level line manager gets uppity motions about 'this is my factory and I should be governing on my own behalf, not as a puppet of the CEO', he or she is going to get smacked down. Despite this, different companies/orgs allow very different levels of initiative at lower levels.

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