Reply #85: Nonsense.

[Igel]

Materialistic, consumerism-driven-based culture doesn't like it. It fragments society and the population.

Look at the history of social groups in America and you find lots and lots of fairly tightly-knit groups--it's just that they're not driven by issues of race. Instead of turning to what remains of the kind of culture that was common 60 or 70 years ago, we tend to dismiss it, denigrate and, and try to extirpate it.

Think of any non-indigenous group that is based on a non-minority ethnicity or religion. Now imagine joining it because it's traditionally been part of American culture. You see what I mean?

Now look at the social groups, whether Rotary or some community orchestra or choir. Such things used to be big. You'd join them and have ready-made social groups. But now we're embarrassed by them, unless they serve some utilitarian purpose, or we think that since we're not pitch-perfect it's a foolish thing to do. That kind of cameraderie isn't taboo--it just takes a different form. It's like saying that X, so common in American culture, is lacking from Arab culture because it's "taboo"--whatever it is, it's probably present. You just have to know what expression it takes. I find that most Americans have, oddly enough, been taught that they have no culture and, even more oddly, never have had one unless it's "ethnic" or "minority." As though we weren't all minorities at some point.

Now consider that most American Indians as a "group" is a homogenized, reconstructed group based entirely on belonging to what came to be defined by Europeans as "Native American" culture or race. Most of the cultures were fairly well shattered by the post-Columbian plagues and later dislocations and language/culture contact; most of what remains of the majority of them correspond to the kinds of anthropoogical relicts you find among Sorbs in Gemany or Slovaks in Hungary or even the Irish in Ireland--they're different from the surrounding culture, but they don't reflect the rich traditions that existed when the culture was a *real* culture. Instead what you get are platitudes, bits of religions mashed together with a bit of post-hoc theologizing and newagism, post-hoc reinterpretations of what survived the destruction of a thousand different, distinct, sometimes mutually hostile cultures. To a very large extent the language revitalization efforts are like the resurrected Cornish or even Hebrew--there's enough of a similarity that the man on the street is convinced that they're continuing the culture and language, but a native speaker would find what's produced to be utterly grotesque, and the bearers of the modern instantiations of the cultures would find a bearer of the culture as it was utterly foreign. They'd also find that it was bleached, reduced to the four Fs.

But it's good for providing even more fracturing and factionalizing of society, if nothing else. Esp. calls to learn about "your real" culture, which trivializes culture, by and large, to food, festivals, fashion and folklore when culture is so, so much more. I guess I should learn "my real" culture, which would be Irish. South Irish. Never mind that my ancestors mostly immigrated here 200 years ago. I should learn the current expression of a culture that my ancestors abandoned generations before I was born. Like that makes any sense whatsoever. Never mind that most of Irish culture is bleached and commercialized, and based on what survived 50 years ago in the north and west, while my ancestors' dialect and culture as a viable set of social norms died out a hundred years before they immigrated.

Even the fractured thing that constitutes US culture is made invisible by many. But while on an exchange program I watched people that bristled at each other on day one become close buddies by day 30. What united them was much more than what separated them--even the pro-abortion, militant feminist and the Baptist preacher were surprised when it was pointed out to them at the end of the exchange program that they'd been spending a lot of time in the same group. It's just that they found the culture they were immersed in--albeit a European one--foreign and turned to the familiar.