That’s certainly understandable; it’s more the idea that this sort of thing is some kind of decline in culture which is aggravating to me.
Austria was pretty multi-ethnic when it ran the Austro-Hungarian Empire. And the music of Dead White Guys will continue to be played–even though the orchestras now include non-whites & non-guys.
Our birth-right citizenship helps greatly in assimilation. German immigration law didn’t work that way until recently; did Austria follow Germany’s political lead once again? Aren’t the Spanish speakers overrunning us here in Texas? No. Spanish was here before English & will not disappear. But English remains strong; most of the Indian, Pakistani, Nigerian & Chinese immigrants knew it before they came. Houston has a long-running program of Shakespeare in Hermann Park (every August) & several local styles of rap/hip hop. We’ve got major opera, symphony & ballet–plus a local gamelan.
Unfortunately, most of what I know about Austrian tourism is what I learned from Rick Steves. (Still have hopes of making it over there.) According to his website, Austria is still in the culture business.
In fact, nostalgic, melancholic musings on Modern Decadenceare old Viennese traditions!
Well bringing in immigrants doesn’t preserve the culture necessarily. Europe has a horrible time of integrating its immigrants. So if you bring in immigrants its not to preserve the culture, as they often try to preserve the culture they left in the new country. Why you bring in immigrants is so the state, not the culture will not collapse economically.
You could do that before the Pill. It’s called condoms.
I think they are being played as often by Koreans and Chinese as anyone else.
How about the freedom to have sex with your wife without risking sending your family into poverty by producing children you can’t afford ? Or killing her due to her medical condition ?
Since enjoying life is what makes life actually worth living, yes I’d say it’s up there.
Traditions and culture aren’t “life”, and if they vanish due to lack of interest, then perhaps they weren’t worth keeping.
I think life is more than just a pulse. You may see it differently. shrugs
:rolleyes: Don’t be silly. Discarding old cultural values and traditions for new ones isn’t the same as having nothing but “just a pulse”.
Heh, you are just as defensive over your traditional culture as anyone else. If liberalism were dying out you’d be dismayed too.
Hm. I think the difference is this. I’d be sad that it has come to a situation where my tastes disagree from those of the ones around me. But I wouldn’t say things like “Those kids don’t appreciate what’s been given to them to steward, opting instead for slow suicide”. It’s as much my fault as it is theirs that our tastes mismatch; which is to say, neither shoulders any blame, it’s just one of those things that inevitably happens. People don’t all like the same things. I couldn’t have really expected differently.
It’s a matter of tone, really. Your tone suggests that you think there’s something somewhat objectively preferable about areas retaining the tastes currently popular within them, particularly when you draw comparisons to deaths of people, and rail against American pop culture, and so forth.
Well in this case the thing that people don’t ‘prefer’ is passing on their genetic and cultural heritage to another generation. It’s not exactly the same kind of preference as wanting to live in the downtown district with the restaurants and jazz bars vs living in the country side with the cicadas.
No one railed against American pop culture, I just said it’s not the same as culture. You’re kind of reading what you want to read in it. If you can’t understand the difference between fads and culture, then there you have removed sufficient nuance to actually discuss the topic.
In my estimation, liberalism may very well be on the way to extinction. Look around, it’s religous conservatives who are reproducing early and often.
What’s the difference?
For instance, American culture: Harvard U., Vanderbilt U., The Marine Corps, Jazz, Rock and Roll, Techno, Biscuits and Gravy, Enchiladas, Surfing in California, Riding the Subway in New York, Towns built around automotive culture.
Pop Culture Fads: Bell Bottoms, Nipple Rings, Mohawks
A culture is something that is passed on through some kind of tradition, whether it be a corporation passing on its legacy to new workers and executives, or an Ivy League school with a tradition of taking the children of Alumni, or a Musical tradition of Irish Jigs played in pubs on Tuesday nights where the old guys teach the young ones how to play the fiddle. That’s culture.
Glow sticks at a rave and hypercolor shirts, are fads.
The transmission from one generation to the next. A fad is a piece of flash, a superficial quality, ephemeral. Culture is transmitted.
brazil84 Irrelevant, plenty of kids become liberals from Conservative families. I certainly hope that the liberal intolerance culture that we labor under today goes away though.
I’m not asking about the difference between pop culture and culture. I’m asking about the difference between the two kinds of preferences in the quote in the post you are responding to. To wit:
What’s the difference between these kinds of preferences? Why should we say they’re not the same kind of thing?
I’m not so sure. Hard core religious types, like the Amish or the Haredim, seem to be pretty good at keeping their young in the fold.
Not really. The Amish have a system where the kid goes off for a year and leaves the community to experience life outside of the community then decides if they want to come back or not. Many don’t. My ex-roommate was an Israeli from an Orthodox family. She had tattoos covering her body dyed her hair all the time and was a total slut, my ex was terrified I was going to sleep with her because she walked around our apartment naked. I could’ve slept with her pretty much any time I wanted I am sufficiently convinced.
Indistinguishable I live in Manhattan right now but could go rent a house in the country any time I wanted to. I could opt for either lifestyle. Culture is a bit more than just lifestyle choices. Sometimes culture requires full commitment in order to experience it. You can’t just live it a la carte. Kind of like how people talk about ‘Cafeteria Catholics’. Culture requires more of a commitment.
I like you most likely have picked a very deracinated culture. If you are much like me you live in a city center, go out to party at the club on occasion, read philosophy or science books here and there. This lifestyle is incompatible with being a full on Catholic for instance. I couldn’t go out and smoke pot and sleep with lots of women and still be a pious Catholic. Sure I could be an impious Catholic but not a pious one. I have picked the modern liberal cosmopolitan existance and I recognize that it is incompatible with other aspects of life. For me the choice was easy because I was born largely without roots to any sort of tradition culture, but it’s different for people who were born into a culture with something that was entirely different, as Clairobscur pointed out earlier.
Culture is a useful fiction. It doesn’t exist.
Houses exist. A house can be destroyed.
You exist. You could be killed.
Culture doesn’t exist. Rather, it is a very useful way of describing the aggregate common preferences that a given group of humans hold.
Nipple rings and raves are a core part of American culture, inasmuch as the population of humans in our area commonly prefer to engage in ostentatious sexual displays during adolescence, and the adults in our area commonly enable such behavior (through, for example, providing licenses to piercing parlors). But that behavior really only occurs on the level of the individual: a person who lacks a nipple ring is every bit as much an American as a person who’s never ridden the subway, never attended an Ivy-league school, never driven a car.
Individuals make choices. We’re a social species, so the choices we make are influenced by the choices others around us make. When a subjectively critical mass of people in a society make similar choices, we call it “culture” for convenience. But all it really is, is a bunch of individuals making their choices.
Culture can change in two ways:
- Some jerk can come along and force people to stop making the choices they want to make. “If you have a picture of the Dalai Lama in your house,” they might say, “I’ll send you to a labor camp.” This is bad, for exactly the same reason it’d be bad for you to tell your girlfriend, “If you have a picture of your ex in your house, I’ll send you to the hospital.” It’s using violence to prevent people from making the choices they want to make. (True, it affects more people, which makes it worse, but it’s not worse on some mystical Destruction-Of-Culture way).
- A person can see the choice that their society has made for a long time, see an alternative choice, and decide to make the alternative choice. An Irishman might decide no longer to smoke at the pub. Two Saudi teenagers might decide to celebrate Valentine’s Day. An American liberal arts professor might decide to wear a suit and tie. If enough people stop making the old choice and start making the new choice, “culture” changes. There’s nothing whatsoever wrong with this form of cultural change. (There may be if the individual choices cause harm–e.g., people start feeding infants formula made from contaminated water instead of breastfeeding–but the fact of cultural change is itself morally uninteresting).
The article laments the fact that the pill allows Austrians to make a choice they were previously unable to make. That’s dangerous nonsense, whether it’s spouted by a scientist or by the Pope. I don’t care if cultural change is happening in the second fashion: all it indicates is a bunch of people making different choices.
Daniel
Well put, LHoD.