|
Let me clarify what I meant: it's not wrong that it's Western/American because it's where it happens to be coming from, which is just the function of US being currently the biggest economic and cultural influencer. But I say it's wrongly called because at its core it's not American - it's older than America, and lots of its part have nothing to do with the US or the Western world. The universal culture is, simply, what wins on the cultural market. Looking through this lens, McDonald's and Coca Cola, and cars and Internet shopping, are present worldwide not because of American imperialism, but because they are better, in many aspects, to what they replace locally. People find utility in fast food restaurants, sweet beverages, urbanization, "western" healthcare, etc. The US isn't parking its aircraft carriers in the Baltic to tell Poland that we have to open Starbucks (and similarly structured competition), nor does Sweden threaten us with another Thirty Years War if we don't start buying prefab furniture. All of those won on the cultural market, and they're only associated with the West because the West is leading in economy and innovation, contributing the most to the universal culture at this time. > In other words, you don't mind a base monoculture and the loss of untold regional treasures and ways of human expression. Actually, I don't. Or put another way - I'm not particularly fond of trying to artificially protect existing local cultures and old traditions. Cultures are mostly arbitrary anyways; I don't care much for what kind of folklore dance I am supposed to engage in at weddings. But I accept that other people do, so I'm also against forcing the choice. But not forcing the choice is also precisely what makes universal culture universal - it's the set of things people adopt on their own over what they did previously. |