Cultural Uplifting

As technological conditions develop, the sophistication of a society’s culture increases in tandem. Just as stone-age values are more compatible for people working within the systems and social arrangements inherent to stone-age civilization, space-age values are more compatible for people working within the systems and social arrangements inherent to space-age civilizations. On the surface, this doesn’t seem to be a problematic statement to make at all but when we look at how we can apply that logic to human civilization, things get trickier. Across the world, different civilizations evolved at different rates and the technological disparities between these civilizations usually determined who conquered who. While we have this notion that different values and beliefs work better than others, the prevailing beliefs and values today truly only became mono-dominant due to the success of the civilizations that espoused them. Different material conditions across the globe created different social conditions across the globe, which gave rise to different flavors of values and beliefs that gradually cohered into borders and nation states. While the Christian nations undoubtedly had a better approach to observing the calendar than the Aztecs did, this didn’t matter in the same ways that the Spanish conquistadors’ armor nullified any blows that the Aztecs could manage to land on the invaders. In this “Chicken or the Egg” scenario, differing technological conditions gave rise to differing cultural conditions, and more advanced cultures won out typically by virtue of being more technologically advanced to begin with. 

Reinforcing this statement, let’s look at the example behind General Custer’s Folly. Unlike other combat scenarios, where more advanced cultures had more advanced weaponry to field, General Custer’s men were equipped with single-shot rifles and were taking on a much larger force of Indians who were equipped with more advanced repeating rifles and carbines. The only reason this battle was recorded in history and widely referenced in the following decades is because of the unusual outcome: the Western man decisively lost, with every soldier under Custer’s command killed while the Plains Indians suffered fewer than a hundred casualties. During an age when European empires spanned the globe and more primitive nations were plundered and sacked on a routine basis, this was an unusual event that challenged the idea behind conventionally held wisdom and concepts like Manifest Destiny. It was not, as many of the Western Europeans came to believe, inevitable that they would win by virtue of their moral or ethnic superiority. For those that thought objectively, the battle showed just how conditional the dominance of the various Western European civilizations across the rest of the world was. Should technological disparities decrease or reverse across different parts of the world, all the values and beliefs in the world wouldn’t amount to anything more than different death shrieks and shouts from those that lost.

With this taken into account, I’m not endorsing a moral relativism in terms of values and beliefs at all. Had the conditions that General Custer encountered been similar in every subsequent battle and war that the United States waged against the Indians, the white man and Indian alike would be worse off for it. For all the land that the Indian nation would still have, being nomadic hunter-gatherers with more advanced firearms than their counterparts across the Atlantic Ocean wouldn’t yield anything of value for them and would leave them far poorer off in the long run than if the more advanced civilizations had continued the colonization process. When we look at the worsening infrastructure and increasing poverty in many post-colonial countries in Africa, while we can point to the shoddily constructed Marxist-Leninist regimes being a major hindrance to development, it ultimately comes down to more primitive cultures being given access to and ownership over things that the native cultural conditions have neither prepared them to appreciate nor understand. While the black man can certainly farm just as well as the white man, Zimbabwe’s government seizing the land of experienced white farmers and distributing those properties to politically connected blacks with no background in farming only lead to widespread famine and calamity. While the black man can certainly run a power grid just as well as the white man, South Africa’s government utility firing thousands of white workers and replacing them with thousands of politically connected blacks with no background in the electrical utility industry has only lead to constant blackouts and productivity losses. 

At the end of the day, the reactionary racism that arises within cultures that lose out on the global stage due to technological disparities does little to ameliorate the problems that these people face. In nations that fall under the spell of ethnocentric anti-colonial regimes, it is inevitable that they violently and brutally impoverish their own citizens in the attempt to restructure their society according to their own more primitive beliefs and values. Just as the biological laws that work in more simple organisms don’t apply in the same way to the functioning of larger organisms, with creatures that benefit from gigantothermy functioning by different rules of homeostasis just due to their size alone, more primitive cultures are not able to take on the responsibility of managing modern technologies and industries on their own. The value mismatch between what works and what they’ve been told works is great enough that the dysfunction is almost always inevitable. Using the biological metaphor again, applying what works conventionally in insects in order to operate an elephant inevitably results in disaster, since different physical laws like the square-cube law come into consideration as animals get larger. In countries that are more willing to work with their former colonial masters, it is always the case that they are far wealthier than their more nationalist counterparts and while I can list off all the reasons why, I think it’s enough of a readily observable fact that it doesn’t need much reinforcement in this article. Across time and space, it is proven again and again that countries that worked better with their western counterparts did far better than countries that tried to strike it out on their own. Japan during its early-20th century economic miracle grew rapidly, mirroring European civilizations in many ways as it adopted values and customs more conducive to building a developed society. The Soviet Union underneath Stalin imported professionals from across the world to teach and train the workers of the Soviet Union, in order to catch up native Russian industries with their western counterparts. China during its economic miracle worked closely with America and European countries, and it was only when its leaders became more antagonistic towards the western world that its fortunes began to precipitously decline. While the West is at the forefront of development and advancement in cultural and technological matters, this does not mean that its existence as a global benefactor is currently sustainable and that leaves open the question: how do we deal with the question of national identity when the majority of cultures in question were conquered in their infancy of sophistication? 

When we take into account that the greatest losers in the global economy today are countries that willingly shut themselves out of cooperation with the West and actively persecute caucasian minority groups that work within industries that the Western colonizers imported, it becomes apparent that the conventional way in which more primitive cultures approach the issue of colonialism is entirely inept in securing what they want for their own people. The traditional method of persecuting diaspora groups that arrived during colonial eras and antagonizing more advanced countries that would otherwise be happy to trade is not a recipe for success, but at the same time, willingly regressing in material conditions in order to continue to develop one’s own native culture along a path free from foreign influences does not yield viable results either. While Pol Pot advocated dewesternization by removing all foreign influences, returning his economy to the literal stone-age, and gradually developing the culture of Cambodia along its own path, this process was so painful and inhumane that no one sane today would endorse anything similar ever again. From what history shows, a voluntary hybridization of cultural values seems to work best in advancing more primitive nations and getting them up to par with their Western counterparts, because it keeps the native culture largely intact while the government purposefully removes inefficient or inhumane elements that have carried over from their nation’s past. Japan is an amazing success story in this regard, with Japan being notable in that it retains a huge amount of its cultural elements from its pre-industrial feudal period while its government has made considerable efforts in the past in order to modernize its own society.

I term this process of “hybridization,” in which countries willingly adopt values and practices from more sophisticated cultures, “cultural uplifting.” Due to the fact that many of these more primitive nations experienced an influx of technologies and information that were several centuries to many millennia beyond what their cultures and belief systems were prepared to deal with, describing it as an uplifting process is entirely fitting. Just as we would have to teach someone from North Sentinel Island about how the world worked in order for them to meaningfully adapt to our current technological and social environment, that process needs to be implemented to a lesser extent across the rest of the world in order for post-colonial nations’ economies to continue to function and provide for their own people. When we look at South African university students deriding the very validity of science, believing instead in the primacy of bush magic out of a rejection for anything Western,  and observe Chinese consumers similarly partaking in TCM out of a misguided notion that traditional knowledge holds more weight than clinical trials, we are looking at the process by which cultures happily and easily regress. In order for us to maintain and continue to develop more advanced technologies, we must be willing to target and annihilate reactionary influences that hinder objectivity. The West’s scientific traditions and materialist outlooks have been instrumental in allowing knowledge and technologies to flourish and grow in sophistication, and without embracing these values, non-Western countries put themselves at an insurmountable disadvantage on the global stage because they’re still binding themselves to pre-Enlightenment values that do not work any longer. Until post-colonial forces are willing to embrace the same values and concepts that allowed Europe to dominate the rest of the world, the West will continue to be at the forefront in cultural and technological matters because it will be the only place where people look forwards instead of backwards, not bearing as much of the burden as other cultures in making their own values and customs compatible with evolving material conditions. For all the systemic faults and degenerative issues found within the Western world, the question becomes: can anyone else take up the task of carrying the torch? I leave that up to the reader to decide, but I’m not convinced that in any country with a viable future that this is possible and even within the Western World, where many hostile immigrant groups refuse to assimilate, there is a growing rejection of objectivity. I find it probable that we will eventually enter a Dark Age, because the forces of objectivity continue to lose the culture war on every front across the globe.