Culture Matters

A Haitian street scene

A while ago, I mentioned to a leftist friend that a big reason I chose to settle in New Brunswick was for the presence of French culture, which I loved growing up in Montreal, and sorely missed.

And his response was, “yes, cultural diversity is good.”

Wait—that’s not what I said. He was tacitly insisting that one culture, even subjectively, even in terms of personal preference, cannot be better than another. 

This is about as sensible as saying that all forms of transportation are equally good, or all governments or forms of government are equally good. A culture is a set of tools for a good life. One tool can always be better than another.

Surely no one has the right to deny the magnificent accomplishments of Greek culture, for example—a nation of only 10 million today. Any honest man must see the magnificent accomplishments of Jewish culture—only about 15 million today. 

RFK Jr. recently noted, in a speech, that the Muslim world has contributed almost nothing to world culture for the past several centuries, despite amounting to about 2 billion people. No Nobel prizes, no new inventions, no great literature, and no stable government. Something is wrong; this is a failing culture.

In a recent news report, El Salvador is sending troops into Haiti, to recover four of their soldiers kidnapped by a local gang. Haiti is always in chaos. This is a failed culture.

I have lived in a number of places around the world, and travelled to others. I certainly did not find life in all of these places equally comfortable, safe, or pleasant. I miss Korean culture mightily. I do not miss the culture of Qatar or Saudi Arabia. Other than money and consumer goods, there was so little there. When Geoguessr drops me somewhere in Europe, I am charmed. When Geoguessr drops me somewhere in Africa, or Indonesia, I am struck by the ugliness and disorder of the place.

Some cultures are actually harmful to mankind, and ought to be eradicated. One might cite Nazi Germany. Or, in Biblical times, Sodom, Gomorrah, or Canaan. Some proposed tools prove too dangerous. We no longer use asbestos as insulation, either. Or fly airships filled with hydrogen.

Of course, different cultures have specialties too—better in one sphere, worse in another. The French are unmatched for their visual sense, except perhaps by the Russians. The English are best at managerial systems and record-keeping. The Italians are best at cuisine. This is the great benefit derived by immigrant cultures like the USA, Canada, Australia, or Singapore. We can pick the best features from each, to form a new culture superior to all. 

Unfortunately, this advantage is being destroyed by the leftist doctrine of DEA, multiculturalism, and cultural equality. Germans or Scots may have a strong tradition in engineering; but we must not hire Germans or Scots, they are overrepresented. Instead, we must hire some sub-Saharan African. This is a fine way to destroy a culture.

The counter-argument given at this point by the left is that these failed or less successful cultures are in the state of poverty and chaos they endure because of colonialism; because they were exploited and possibly infantilized by the Europeans.

That will not wash. In any place you might name, the Europeans left generations ago. Somalia became independent in 1960. Haiti became independent in 1804. They have been in chaos ever since. Compare Spain: Columbus discovered the Americas the very year Spain managed to fully decolonize from the Moors. Within a generation, they were the world’s greatest power. The Dutch Republic achieved independence from Spain in 1648; they had already started to develop an East Indian empire in 1604. The Irish keep winning Nobel Prizes for literature—despite centuries of suppression of Irish culture and economic exploitation under Britain. They only achieved independence in 1921. Germany has risen from ashes since 1945, and twice since 1918. Korean culture was systematically suppressed by Japan until 1945—look where they are now. And the Jews—they emerged from genocide only in 1945 to re-establish their present prominence. 

The original premise of world colonization by Europe was actually that they were there to introduce peace, order, human rights, and a better way to less accomplished lands. To build railroads and canals and civil government. 

The results in many lands once they pulled out seem to validate this assumption. One can see the decline of Zimbabwe since majority rule; one can see the fall of South Africa. One can see the political chaos and repression in the Muslim world.

And perhaps the most obviously failed cultures of all are those currently glorified as “indigenous” or “aboriginal.” Cultures that never emerged from the stone age, never invented the wheel or writing, and were at near-constant war. Not smart or kind to want to preserve them.

What Others Think of Us

In my work, I get to talk to a lot of people from China, both in China and in Canada. I had an interesting talk with one last night. He himself travels regularly between Canada, China, and Europe.

He lamented that Canada and Western Europe were destroying themselves with “woke politics.” He said Chinese people used to think Europe was clean, orderly, and safe. Now they are afraid to visit. He believes Europe cannot be saved now; it is too late. He is grateful that there is no woke attitude in China. 

He finds DEI appallingly unjust and harmful to development.

He thinks Muslim immigration is a problem. 

He thinks Brampton is not a good place to visit or to live; dirty and dangerous because of the South Asian immigrant population.

He thinks it is a mistake to bring in so many low-skilled immigrants.

He thinks censorship is worse in Canada now than in China.

He thinks Canada is on a rapid downward slide. He thinks the best thing to do would be to join the USA.

Just so you know what the Chinese man in the street thinks...

A Priest Dies on YouTube

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The Stone That Is Rejected

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Simeon and Anna meet the child Jesus in the temple.

Was Muhammed the Antichrist?

 The case can be made....

A Word on Feminism

 

Betty Friedan

Having lived abroad for some years, I have perhaps some distance, some objectivity. I can say that feminism has ruined North American women. 

It has set up any relationship for them as a struggle for power—“the personal is political.” No room for mutual support; no room for affection. Men are the ancestral enemy. They must be made to submit. They must submit to the woman in all situations.

This is seen as well in the “Karen” phenomenon. This is an assumption of power: each woman considers herself the ultimate authority on everything, and everyone else must defer to her.

This certainly does not work for men. A relationship with a woman means surrendering his freedom entirely to her leadership—and freedom is far more important for men than for women. And what does he get in return? A mother for his children? She’s not interested. Pregnancy and childrearing are oppressive—“barefoot, pregnant, and in the kitchen.” Therefore children are resented. She will abandon them to strangers for the sake of her career, if she does not abort them.

So, he loses freedom, gets no affection or respect, does not get a stable home life, and she may leave him at any time, and take the house and kids. He has invited an enemy into his life, into his home, into his bedroom.

But interestingly, this does not work for women either. Surveys suggest women are less happy than they used to be in pre-feminine societies. Women do not naturally crave independence and leadership—these are male values. They naturally crave security, affection, and human contact: the things feminism has turned them away from. 

This itself illustrates why women should not lead in the home: they lack a natural sense of direction, literally, figuratively, and in all spheres. They are hard-wired instead to be flexible, and to follow the leader. Feminism has become the leader, and they are following it, against their better interests, right off a cliff. And, as they have assumed leadership in the family, they are dragging men, children, and society as a whole off that cliff with them.

Pray for Pope Leo

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Information Wants to be Free

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Few Are Chosen

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What Hypocrisy Is Not

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Why I Dislike Catcher in the Rye

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J.D. Salinger

Synodality: A Primer

 As compared with the older, now obsolete, gospel traditions.

On SubStack.

Heaven Is for Real

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On the "Cultural Genocide" of Canada's "First Nations"

Apparently, European-Canadians are guilty of suppressing Indian culture, if only by their mere presence for the past 400 years or so.

Ah yes, Indian culture. 

How extensive could that culture have been, given that the local tribes had never come up with the wheel, or metals, or the domestication of animals? The early French explorers described the Indians they met, including the relatively advanced Huron and Iroquois, as “Sans loi, sans foi, sans roi.” Without law, without religion, without government.

What then did they have?

It is hard to get far as a culture with no writing system. Some things can be passed on orally, but oral witness is unreliable. Beyond the length of one lifetime, it is hearsay. What is passed on orally must also depend on a body of people able to grasp its meaning and significance, for it to be memorized and preserved. A written record, by contrast, can sit for some time ignored and forgotten, and then be rediscovered by some solitary keen mind able to receive it.

And was there any great body of oral record-keepers available? Each tribe, even each language group, was quite small, and not in much communication with their neighbours. Supposedly, wisdom was passed on by the few elders—distinguished only by being old.

Other than on the West Coast, these tribes were nomadic. They followed the game. They had no beasts of burden nor vehicles. They could not, as a practical matter, carry anyone who could not keep up. On top of that, many starved every winter, young and especially old. Often they could not afford to feed someone who could not hunt. Elders were eventually left to die. 

This tended to limit the number of elders available for cultural transmission.

And that’s not all. On top of the sparse population, it seems there were epidemics about every two generations that killed most of the tribe. Whenever the Europeans came to a new area, from the 16th through the 19th centuries, from Champlain through Lewis and Clarke, they found abandoned villages and clearings, the majority of the local population recently wiped out. How is it possible that this could all be due to first contact with European diseases, even three centuries later? By then, they should have developed natural immunity, even if they had none in 1492.

The Hudson’s Bay Company, trading with the Indians in the Northwest for several centuries, actually witnessed local tribes being devastated by repeated epidemics about every forty years.

Which is to demonstrate that the story that the Europeans wiped out the native people by disease, even inadvertently, seems to be another myth. 

There is an epidemiological advantage to a relatively high population density. It allows a virus to abide in a population and in its cattle, spreading at low levels, naturally inoculating and preserving herd immunity. When your population density is too low, as in nomadic hunter-gatherers, the virus can die out in that population in a generation or two, leaving everyone once again with no immunity. Within about two generations. 

This had probably been going on for thousands of years, with or without Europeans.

Now, what does it mean for a culture when almost all its members die off every forty years? How much gets passed on orally? 

So it is not as if contact with the Europeans could have wiped out Indian culture. After all, if learning something new wipes out your culture, if your culture is preserved only by ignorance of any other, what does that say about your culture? 

Anything of value will naturally be, and has been, preserved—the canoe, lacrosse, toboggans, moccasins, snowshoes, parkas, and so forth. If some cultural element was not preserved, it is because people found it was not useful. Culture is for man, not man for the culture.

America Derangement Syndrome

 

A week or so ago, YouTuber JJ McCullough posted a video arguing that Mark Carney’s drive for “associate membership” in the EU made no sense. He almost immediately took it down, unable to stand all the hostile comments it elicited.

Canadians have America Derangement Syndrome, which is strikingly similar to Trump Derangement Syndrome. It may be the same underlying disease. But it has endured much longer in Canada.

To begin with, McCullough is obviously right. Carney’s initiative makes no economic sense. Canada already has free trade with the EU. So the only point of the exercise seems to be to annoy the Americans, our biggest trading partner. Like his recent cozying up to China. It is all reminiscent of the early days of Castro’s Cuba. Not a wise strategy.

McCullough is also obviously right that English Canada has far more in common culturally with the US than with the 27 members of the EU. Language, history, geography, customs, sports, music, legal traditions, blood ties. We are Americans—America Derangement Syndrome is a form of self-hate.

And maybe that explains Trump Derangement Syndrome too. Trump is not just too pro-American, but too stereotypically American, for self-hating Americans. A billionaire who has carefully crafted his persona as an incarnation of success in the free market—the American Dream. He is offensively blond—even making a display of his hair. He is, God forbid, a salesman, and actually proud of it: an occupation beneath the contempt of any proper European aristocrat. He is brash and straightforward in the way Europeans have always found Americans to be brash. He is impolite, undiplomatic. 

On becoming president in 1801, Thomas Jefferson made a point of not following protocol in entertaining the British ambassador. This was the new American way; Thomas Wolfe has described it as “the birth of the American idea.” European concerns with manners merely served the interests of a ruling class. 

Is there a cure for America Derangement Syndrome? It seems impervious to either evidence or reason.

Turtles All the Way Down

A Hindu traditional image of the cosmos

I was upset, unreasonably, by a recent bit by the National Post on “Turtle Island.”  Because they were saying what I’d been saying for years. And no one has been listening. I want credit!

It was about “Turtle Island” supposedly being the traditional name for North America among the native peoples, the “First Nations.” There are problems with that idea.

First, the native people would have had no idea what a continent was, let alone having a name for the one they were supposedly on. Micmac living in Nova Scotia, say, would have had no idea there was a vast ocean five thousand kilometers to their West, nor one as distant to their North, or to their South. Nor would they have imagined this was of any significance. Continents are a fairly arbitrary Western idea, a cultural construct. Why, for example, are North and South America separate continents? More or less because Teddy Roosevelt dug the Panama Canal. In much of Europe, the Americas are still not considered two continents, but one. And what is the sense of seeing Europe and Asia as two continents instead of one? Why do the Urals split continents, but not the Himalayas or the Andes? 

When some ancient culture refers to living on a large island –as they all do -- they are conceiving of all creation, the ordered cosmos, as an island, not this or that body of land. And surrounded not by physical seawater but by the “sea” of chaos. Ancient Greece conceived it so, Ancient Mesopotamia conceived it so, and so did the Old Testament’s seven days of creation. “Turtle Island” is not North America, or even planet Earth, but the cosmos, the material world.

And according to the native people, there ain’t necessarily no turtle, either. There were thousands of different ethnicities wandering about Canada, each with their different creation myths. Perhaps one or two involved a turtle; perhaps none.

The “Turtle Island” concept as supposed native name for North America comes from Gary Snyder, West Coast Beat poet and environmental activist, who used it as the title of a poetry collection in 1974. He claimed without evidence that it was from Native American culture. He really got it from India, and from the Western philosophical tradition. It is an old Hindu idea that the world is supported on the backs of elephants who stand on a turtle. This image, misunderstood to be literal, has been preserved since the 19th century by European/American philosophers to be mocked as an example of primitive thinking and of infinite regression: “it’s turtles all the way down.”

Probably most people today claiming to be “First Nations” genuinely believe this was their own ancestral belief. How would they know? They got that idea from the TV, like the rest of us. They grew up in the same culture as the rest of us. “Native wisdom” is all a childish fantasy from the hippie movement of the 60s.

Felix Culpa

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Here Comes the Cybercab

We have been promised self-driving cars for some time. Now, it seems, thanks to AI, it is actually happening. Tesla is rolling out its Cybercab, joining Waymo, already operating in ten US cities. According to the stats I have seen, operating costs are only 25 cents US a mile. Even that price might come down as we develop cheaper sources of electricity, nuclear reactors or solar power. And the self-driving cars are seven times less likely than human drivers to cause accidents—a figure that can only stand to go down as the AI improves.

This will lower the cost of insurance. It will also lower the large number of people killed or injured in traffic accidents, and not that incidentally, as a knock-on, the costs of medical care.

A century or so ago, the private automobile drastically changed the landscape. Highways, malls, drive-in everything, large areas set aside for parking. We are about to see a similar dramatic change now.

Nobody will need any longer to own a private car—a major living expense. It will make more sense to pay ride for ride; or, if you own a car, you will rent it out when you are not using it, auto-Uber, making it pay for itself. 

This will be a big reduction in the cost of living for the average family. It will be a bigger advantage to the poor, the disabled, and the elderly.

With everyone doubling up on vehicles, we will need fewer roads per capita. Nor will a self-driving cab need parking space at the destination. It can move on to the next customer, and reappear when needed.

This will free up a huge amount of prime real estate for development. Downtowns should regain advantage over malls. The cost of housing should go down, without the need to sacrifice so much to parking for residents.

In smaller cities, public transit will probably no longer be required. Taking a cybercab will be cheaper and more convenient. But we may also have cyber buses, driving costs down even lower. It may make sense for municipalities to offer the rides for free.

If you are in a larger city, and have a long commute—now you can be working as you ride. 

And as for long-distance transport—we will no doubt also have cyber semis. This will draw down the cost of transportation, making all manner of goods cheaper to the consumer. Notably food. 

And this is all about to unfold.