Recognizing Your Culture
A friend of mine told me that he doesn’t believe white culture exists anymore. As an American that descended from the Finnish and Swiss, he doesn’t practice any of his ancestral traditions, so surely a white culture couldn’t exist.
I believe he confused national culture for white culture, which many White Pride advocates also confuse: That one’s British, Swedish, French, German, etc. backgrounds define what it might mean to be white. It is precisely the overall spiritual agreement between all of these national cultures that produced white culture. That is, the core value of all these disparate European cultures are rooted in something much more pervasive than a regional dish or traditional clothing item.
When the Spanish, Danish, and British entered the New World in the 15th and 16th centuries, the indigenous did not find much difference in their approach to the land and spirituality: All were rootless, seeking to exploit and find economic opportunity in the profane. Their different languages and attires made no distinction for the core ethical value of the European: To subjugate all land and foreign peoples under the purview of a European spirituality that pitted itself against Nature and anything associated with it.
So I updated this analogy for my friend, borrowing a difference essence from David Foster Wallace’s “This Is Water” speech: Recognize every little thing in our society that we think is default, assumed—that is our culture. Saving for retirement, purchasing a house, voting during elections, maintaining a job until said retirement, staying out of jail, being well-read, going to university, not being homeless… These are assumed states of being within our society, almost completely unquestioned—to the point of becoming social mores. Recognize these apparently default states and ask these three questions: 1) Are these assumptions eternal? 2) Could they be applied to all cultures that ever existed? 3) Must they be applied to all cultures that will ever exist?
1) Are these assumptions eternal?
We don’t have to go far back in time to see that thousands of cultures around the world did not subscribe to these assumptions, nor did they have the prior assumptions to allow the supposedly unquestionable any existence: Many cultures didn’t have monetary, election, or economic systems that necessitated “saving”, “voting”, or “retirement”. Like Pierre-Antonie Tabeau concluded that, “with the bow and arrow the Savage of the Upper Missouri can do easily without our trade, which becomes necessary to them only after it has created the needs.”
Thus our defaults are not eternal, but created, based on the need of a culture, not of people. We work, save, vote, study, and retire not because that is what humans do, but it is what our culture does.
2) Could these assumptions be applied to all cultures that ever existed?
We already know that these assumptions hardly applied to all cultures, particularly the American and the Polynesian indigenous because they never found a need to facilitate such defaults… We also know that these assumptions are about 10,000 years old, with the advent of agriculture and the resulting demand for food and supply surplus. Only then could money be rendered for ease of economic transaction, and hoarded as a more efficient means of maintaining surplus without the labor of cultivating land. “Saving”, the hoarding of monetary resources, could only become an assumption for a culture who had removed itself from the bounty of the land—either through over-exploitation or lacking the knowledge of how land provides its bounty, thereby necessitating reliance on the monetary abstraction of survival. Or, as 19th century philanthropist Robert Berkhofer outlines the process for the American indigenous:
We need to awaken in him wants. In his dull savagery he must be touched by the wings of the divine angel of discontent… Discontent with the tepee and the satarving rations of the Indian camp in winter is needed to get the Indian out of the blanket and into trousers—and trousers with a pocket in them, and with a pocket that aches to be filled with dollars!
No, these defaults only apply to our own culture, yet we so desperately want all others to subscribe to them as well.
3) Must these defaults be applied to all cultures that will ever exist?
This is more of a self-reflective question than the previous interrogations: Do you wish these assumptions upon others? Do you believe that these are defaults that our successors should abide by as they grow to teach their own children about what is assumed and what could be left behind? Is there a natural dignity to “savings”, “voting”, “retirement”, “staying out of jail”, and everything they imply?
This question is most important when recognizing one’s culture and combatting an accidental ideological expansion: There is nothing more dangerous than one who denies their own cultural standing yet pushes it on others without understanding that its assumptions are not the key to human prosperity, but only helpful to the individuals who are desperate to adapt and survive the coming tide of cultural dogma.
My friend may find no existence of white culture, yet wonder why nations and communities do not conform to his assumptions of what it means to be a man, a citizen, an adult, a responsible financial agent, a well-functioning human being. And it is precisely in his bewilderment where white culture exists, where the question “Why aren’t these other people upholding the standards I find self-evident?” is answered with an assumption that these others must not understand the value of such defaults or must be resisting against prosperity itself. This bewilderment over the other is the symptom of the core value that rode upon European ships almost half a millennia ago: To isolate Man from Nature, Man from his community, and repurpose Man as an individualized economic agent, with the world as his own canvas, destined for a Hobbesian clash with everyone and everything else existing in the world. The other doesn’t understand our supposed destiny, and thus remain marginalized, apparently unable to adapt to our defaults.
More tragically, and perhaps in support of my friend’s thoughts, white culture, European culture, civilizational culture has pervaded nearly every inch of this globalized world—I can hardly find a difference between a Bolivian and an Italian and a Czecho-Slovakian and an American and a Sri Lankan and a Ugandan and an Indian: The spirit of white culture has committed almost all individuals to only one thing: A rush to get what’s mine.
Or as Shabazz Palaces eloquently raps:
The nights are getting stronger and the days are getting longer,
the buildings getting bigger,
outside is getting smaller.
The lies are getting truer and the truth is getting brighter
Things are looking blacker
But black is looking whiter.
Let us first recognize the air we breathe and the assumptions we hold onto—and the malleability of those assumptions—so that we do not fall into defaults without some consideration, and we do not carry on our backs the lifelessness of cultural baggage that seeks not life but only dogmatic faith in itself.