[carbadtraingood]

Is it? Is the culture of Paris fairly homogenous? New York? London? Berlin?

I would imagine the place has some shared cultural understandings, generally, but that a big city is going to be much more heterogenous. But maybe I'm thinking too micro scale.

[carlmr]

This seems like the old lumpers vs splitters issue:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lumpers_and_splitters

There's definitely something different in Berlin vs New York culture, and me, a person that sees commonalities everywhere, i.e. a lumper, definitely sees a common/dominant culture in each of these places.

On the other side you have splitters that always find a reason to differentiate more.

There's no right and wrong on this discussion, it's subjective in essence, you can always lump or split by your own rules. That is a classification problem.

Darwin talked about it at length, because he was annoyed by splitters denying any kind of classification, making it really hard to make a taxonomy.

If you split too much, every human is an individual, you can't say anything about anything anymore.

If you lump too much, all humans are the same, you can't say anything about anything either.

The sweet spot is somewhere in between, where you can speak about Moscow, vs Berlin, vs New York culture. Because there's definitely something different about these places. And neither say they're all the same, or that you have to look at each individual before making a judgment.

But most people can't agree where exactly this sweet spot is.

[smsm42]

You need to realize though the West has embraced multiculturalism, largely. Russia has not. It does not mean there are no diverse cultures in Russia - or even Moscow, but it does mean there is one dominant culture, and closer you get to the places where power is accessible, the more dominant and more exclusive it becomes. There are various cultures found in Moscow (and any big city in Russia), but there is also the Culture. In the West, a lot of effort is taken for the old Western culture not to be the culture of Paris, New York, London, Berlin, etc. Some endorse these efforts, some decry them, but it is obvious they happen. In Russia, nothing of the sort happens, on the contrary, if you want to be in power, you will abandon whatever culture you came from and embrace the culture of power. If you do not, you'll never get to wield any power.

[TylerLives]

What is the "culture of power", can you give some examples? And what are your pronouns?

[smsm42]

> What is the "culture of power", can you give some examples?

I thought I did, in my comments uptopic. If you expect me to write a doctoral thesis on modern Russian culture, sorry, I am neither qualified nor it is the right place. While I have plenties of anecdotal data, and would be glad to share my experience to the extent I can, systematic treatment of a culture is not something one could do in a random comment on HN. I can name it, at best - Russian Imperial culture, and describe some of its qualities, but anything beyond that will have to wait for somebody who either has a PhD or wants to get one researching Russian culture.

> And what are your pronouns?

None of your business/None of your business.

[TylerLives]

If you're talking about your first comment in this chain(about people refusing to take responsibility), I don't see how that's related to multiculturalism. I've never been to Russia, and I don't even watch Russian media often, but from what I can see, they're trying to promote multiculturalism a lot.

It's not that I don't believe that Russia has a "culture of power" and that people at the top all share the same ideology, but this is happening everywhere.

[smsm42]

The culture comment was an answer to the critique that you can not talk about culture in Russia because there are many cultures. There are, but one of them is dominant. They do not promote multiculturalism, at least not what is meant by that in the West. On the contrary, the staple of their official ideology is preserving Russia's uniqueness at all costs - even at the cost of rejecting humanist values that are considered "Western". Other cultures are allowed if they are subservient to the imperial culture - same story in every empire, really, take a book about any imperial culture, Russia's one would have similar traits, it's not unique in that regard. The main source of conflict now is that imperial culture needs much more of an empire than Russia currently is, thus obsession with territorial conquest, despite already having huge undeveloped and neglected territories.