My Son vs the Global Monoculture
The other day I set to wondering what Joseph would make of his Spanish heritage – much more immediate for him with Spanish grandparents than my own distant Scottish and Irish relatives whom I was born too late to meet. But I suspect the answer will be “not much” – that he will grow up like all children of the twenty-first century, considering national and regional cultures to be a thing of only historical significance. Cheap travel and global communications are already merging cultures, and the pace of the change is only going to increase.
McDonalds in Fanateer, Saudi Arabia
In a way, it’s sad – like the loss of a species or a language, the erosion of a cultural identity is removing information from the world that we can’t necessarily get back when we decide we want it again.
But on the other hand, the more blended global cultures become, the more possibilities we have. Our common memes are making us immune to “culture shock” and allowing us to communicate with other people who a century ago we would have thought of as ‘alien’ – turns out, of course, they’re just like us. A society that has given up on the need to hold onto its historical culture can integrate everybody and every good idea, no matter how ‘alien’.
It’s started. Chinese food is no longer exotic, it’s just food. Coke and McDonalds aren’t American, because they’re everywhere. Good ideas – even ones high in saturated fat – belong to the world, not the country where they began.
So regardless of what my son thinks of his Spanish roots, I look forward to a future where he can travel and communicate with others from the far corners of the world without cultural differences getting in the way.
I’m pretty much with you on this but: “I look forward to a future where he can travel and communicate with others from the far corners of the world without cultural differences getting in the way.”
Just thought it would be worth pointing out that the more culturally homogeneous we become, the less travel seems to give any meaningful reward. Okay, so the landscape may be different but what does that matter if all you’re doing is visiting ‘Britain but with different weather’?
The reward in travel for me is not so much experiencing different cultures but in managing to function as a normal person in whatever culture and not come across as a tourist. Possibly a weird by-product of growing up in a tourist town.
That said, I do realise that other people do travel for that reason. A lot of science fiction that has trodden this particular path has ended up with things like “culture reserves” in the sense that the US has “reserves” to preserve what little remains of Native American culture. That doesn’t feel like a nice solution though, and the science fiction they appear in tends towards the dystopian. (I suspect we’re heading for one of those futures anyway, but that’s probably worth saving for another post…) 🙂
The idea of trying to forcible preserve culture does seem very dystopian. It also seems to somewhat miss the point; people want to experience living breathing cultures, not artificially maintained cultural reserves
The problem with living breathing cultures is that they do change though. .It would be unnatural to expect a culture to remain static and unchanged by the cultures surrounding it.
Absolutely. I suppose I’m a bit fatalistic about it — just like languages, cultures are bound to evolve over time whether we like it or not, so we might as well learn to like it!
Right now, a hundred years since the invention of flight and forty since the Internet, that change is towards the merging of geographically-separated cultures. Who knows what it might be in a hundred years from now — maybe we’ll go all Golden Age and decide to geographically segregate ourselves based on cultures that we particularly like. That might be fun, though not without its share of problems.