Race is hardware, but culture is software

I'm a culturalist

Published on February 12, 2006 By Draginol In Current Events

I have little patience for racists. Most racists I encounter fall into two groups:

Group 1: People who are indoctrinated to be racists. They grow up around racist people and become racist themselves. These are the people who will go to ridiculous lengths to "prove" that one race is "better" than another.

Group 2: People who confuse race with culture. They'll say "Look at all those <insert racial group here> doing that? They're natural born <insert insult here>." No. Not true. Not natural born. Perhaps a product of their culture but not of their genetic code.

To use an analogy, ones race is like the hardware of a person. And while there are certainly minute differences between one race and another due to the pressures of natural selection over the past 100,000 years, those differences are not very significant. Simply put, humans are remarkably similar genetically.

But culture is a whole different thing. Culture is like the operating system. For example, if you take two identical personal computers and install two different operating systems on them, they will behave remarkably different. And on that point, I won't cower to political correctness and try to say all cultures are equal. They are not.

I don't even think it's a value judgment. A culture's ability to produce happy, well adjusted people who live a long productive life has some subjectivity to it but not a lot. If someone reading this wants to say "Well maybe misery and suffering is 'good' to some people? Who is to say that happiness, joy, physical health, and longevity are 'better'?" To those people I say, go away and get a life. Let's be real.

Operating system debates are pretty common. MacOS vs Windows vs. AmigaOS vs. OS/2 vs. Linux and so forth. And indeed, it gets hard to say that one is "better" in all ways than another. Few are. But in the case of human culture, I don't think it's a MacOS vs. Windows XP type debate. It's more like a MacOS vs. some machine whose running an OS that requires people to flip switches and put in punch cards. The differences between some human cultures is so vast that it's pretty obvious that it's not geography or bad luck that caused the discrepancies. It's that their culture is holding them back.

Some cultures simply fail, utterly, to produce happy, healthy, prosperous, productive people.

When I see the behavior of the Islamic world, I don't think "Damn Arabs." I don't think there's any significant genetic difference. But I think at this point we can say that the Islamic culture, as a whole, has some serious problems. It is not as good as other cultures. I mean that. It's the Vic-20 of cultures. And I'm not just comparing them to the west.

There are several different major cultures on our planet:

American liberalism
European socialism
Japanese
Chinese
Indian
Russian Orthodox
Latin American
Islamic

These are just the largest ones that come to mind that have a specific identity. There are sub-cultures as well. African-Americanism, Latin American Socialism, Sub-Sahara African cultures, Eastern Europe Orthodoxy/Slavic which is quite different than European Socialism, Australian liberalism. And even within these various groups, there are different modest differences. I'm just pointing this out before someone jumps in with semantics and wants to list off the ones I mised.

Most of the major cultures have their pros and cons to them. Just as we might debate whether MacOS is better than Windows XP, we can debate whether American liberalism, with its consumerism is better than European socialism with its economic stagnation. Each has its problems. So for the most part, debating the various major cultures is like trying to debate Windows vs. Linux vs. Mac and so forth.

But it seems to me that the Islamic culture stands out amongst them all as being the most problematic. It has been this way for my entire life. I can't remember a time in my 34 years of life where the Islamic World wasn't blowing up something, murdering innocencts, or lashing out at something. And over what? There are lots of theories as to why there are Muslim extremists who have a pattern of doing this kind of thing. I can't think of any other cultures that so routinely and consistently use their people as ordinance. Muslims can't even claim to have suffered particularly harshly compared to other cultures.

My personal theory is that at some level, Muslims know that there is something wrong with their culture. That it fails to produce happy, healthy, prosperous people at anywhere near the rate of other cultures. And rather than trying to adapt (borrow features from) other cultures, it simply blames other cultures and lashes out.

The Muslim riots over the pictures of their prophet being in a Danish newspaper come across as more than just violent. They come across as infantile. A big temper tantrum from a culture that routinely cuts the heads off people, sets fire to the religious and national symbols of other cultures and nations, and intentionally murders women and children whose crime is that they are from a different culture. If the Muslim world were an individual person, it would be a slow-witted spoiled brat child with psychotic tendancies.

I personally think the world would be better off if Islamic culture were to disappear -- entirely. I definitely think that the human beings who inhabit the places that are dominated by that culture would be better off (the women definitely would be). I can't think of a single contribution to the world that the Islamic world has provided in the past 500 years. You have to go all the way back to the middle ages to find anything and how much of that was due to geography -- the Islamic world is centered around the fertile crescent where much of Indoeuropean civilization started from.

But as a practical matter, people won't stand up and say the obvious: Some cultures are not as good as others. They won't say it because you'll have unscrupulous politicians and opportunists tag those who say it as "Racist" even though race and culture are unrelated. And because people won't say the obvious, they cannot move people to action. A worldwide movement to put pressure on the Islamic world to knock it off and grow up would probably do some good.

While the other cultures continue to evolve and improve themselves, the Islamic culture stagnates and revels in hatred and violence. So yea, you could say I'm a culturalist. I think some cultures are more worthy than others. I define "Better" in terms that I think are pretty universal for human kind. Happiness. Health. Longevity. Prosperity. Productivity.

Comments (Page 6)

bakerstreet

on Feb 17, 2006

"China was colonised."

Huh? I guess you could say by the mongols in the Middle Ages, i guess. Who's colonized them since then?

Leauki

on Feb 17, 2006

Who's colonized them since then?

European countries and Japan.

My mother's grand father apparently fought there.

cactoblasta

on Feb 17, 2006

European countries and Japan.

My mother's grand father apparently fought there.

Really? Perhaps China then was one of the exceptions. Certainly you don't see the cultural confusion that seems to follow former colonies like a stray dog.

But another little difference I noticed is that we have very few black Africans who fly planes into buildings, bomb random people in Spain or England, try to get rid of all the Jews in Africa, believing that this would somehow solve their problems, or try to get nuclear weapons while announcing that they want to see another country removed from the map.

They don't have the money to do any of these things, nor do they have the money to successfully organise. I'm assuming you're a white American; do you really think you could wander around Africa completely free from the sort of intolerance you'd find in the Middle East? Africa lacks the capacity to strike outside its border, possibly due to the inherently tribal nature of its social ties. The Arab states have both the capacity and the diverse connections to do so. That's the only difference. The hate is much the same.

cactoblasta

on Feb 17, 2006

Canada and Australia were colonised. Don't tell me the reason they are doing so well is because their inhabitants are white.

Canada and Australia were not colonised in the same way as say Nigeria or South Africa were colonised. In Australia, Canada and the US the local inhabitants were exterminated in order to make way for new settlers. That is very different to what happened in India or the Middle East.

Many of the African states which were colonised, are Christian (or at least not Islamic), and are not doing well were subject to civil wars usually sparked by communist or Islamic militias. Some African countries did rather well in the 20th century.

Yes, and to a large extent those who suffered the uprisings were often brutal dictatorships. Incidentally, which African countries did well in the 20th century?

Leauki

on Feb 17, 2006

I am not a white American. If you think that the hate is the same you have probably not spoken with many Arabs and Africans.

Africa might lack the capacity to strike outside its border (although I don't think you need much of a capacity to hijack a plane and fly it into a building or for organising suicide attacks), but I have no reason to believe that they would attack if only they could.

I specifically told you not to tell me that it is because the inhabitants are white, but you have basically done exactly that.

Whether one group was exterminated or not doesn't make a difference for the economy. A population that replaced an aboriginal group is just as capable of greatness as an aboriginal group. The difference is cultural, and that is exactly the point here.

Incidentally, which African countries did well in the 20th century?

Botswana.

Namibia (yes, the vast majority of the population lives in poverty, but the GDP per person shows that the economy does produce enough).

South Africa (again, the economy produced enough for everyone).

A few other countries also did fairly well. This shows that in spite of colonialism these countries CAN do well.

What colonialism did was to establish unjust systems within the countries (even though that is not what the British wanted or legally supported!), but it did not prevent them from becoming wealthy.

Any society made up of any type of people can turn any country into a wealthy economy. The only decisive show-stopper is what the society does, not the country's past.

And what the society does is what culture is about.

The people of Botswana have all the same means as most Arab countries. But they don't fly airplanes into buildings anyway. And I have not heard of many suicide attacks against whites or Jews or whomever they could possibly blame for any problems they have.

Botswana is doing better than Libya. And Botswana is a democracy while Libya is Islamic AND communist. Botswana doesn't attack anyone and Libya was involved in terrorist acts and had a WMD program. Guess what caused the difference between the two.

It was not western imperialism. Libya has been independent for longer than Botswana. Both have significant natural resources.

No, my friend, you are barking up the wrong tree here. Colonialism is not the great differentiator. It's Islam and Arab nationalism. Those countries that experience both are the poorest in the world; unless they happen to have lots of oil, but even then Islam and Arab nationalism can take the country down.

And Libya is among the worst, as it suffers from political Islam, Arab nationalism, and communism. Other countries need several civil wars to reach the same level!

(Incidentally, those Arab countries with lots of oil that do best are those that don't advocate political Islam and that do not participate in Arab nationalism.)

kingbee

on Feb 18, 2006

i'm with cacto here.

first of all, several of the cultures proposed really aren't.

while some island and coastal nations of southeast asia such as indonesia and malaysia may have large muslim populations, adherents of islam in those areas have little in common with arabs, persians or any of the other native peoples of the middle east.

arabic isn't their first language. the sufis responsible for converting southeast asians from hinduism or bhuddism melded islam to fit them rather than the other way around. they may worship allah, but their languages, art, music, dance forms, social customs and structure remain prevalent and distinct..

on the other hand, both middle eastern and southeast asian muslims have at least one other defining experience in common: both were subjugated by european colonialists. in fact, for some in southeast asia conversion to islam very likely was an act of resistance against their portugese masters.
.
latin american culture is a stew consisting mostly of spanish/portugese language, customs, etc., seasoned with several large dollops of essence of africa and served over a bed of indigenous empire remnants..

russian (and other eastern european) orthodoxy is the bastard child of the schism between the roman and byzantine churches and hardly uniquely russian or slavic. it it were a drink, it would be ouzo & vodka.

china is only now finally emerging from 100 years of western colonial exploitation that nearly destroyed it as a nation by the beginning of the 20th century.

kingbee

on Feb 18, 2006

we have very few black Africans who fly planes into buildings, bomb random people in Spain or England, try to get rid of all the Jews in Africa, believing that this would somehow solve their problems, or try to get nuclear weapons while announcing that they want to see another country removed from the map

so far.

many of the french rioters were black africans--as were the kids whose deaths sparked the riots.

kingbee

on Feb 18, 2006

Who's colonized them since then?

the dutch, portugese and the brits.

Dr Guy

on Feb 28, 2006

Who's colonized them since then?

the dutch, portugese and the brits.

No, they snipped at the edges. They did not colonize the whole country. There is a difference.

Demosthenes Locke

on Mar 01, 2006

first of all, several of the cultures proposed really aren't

Why not? Because they're not closely aligned in all of their behavior? Latching onto Brad's analogy, don't they still have the same operating system, with perhaps different installed programs. They all run Windows, but one is on MS Office, while another uses Word Perfect. If the problem is in the operating system, it doesn't matter that there are differences in the programs that each one runs, i.e. the differential in other areas of the populations' cultures.

In the US, we have a base set of principles which essentially define our culture, but there are incredible variations in each locality. We still maintain certain aspects that are part of the American culture in all areas. Were these problematic, then the local differences would be irrelevant.

bakerstreet

on Mar 01, 2006

Oddly, though the cultures do differ, you still see people calling for beheadings from the pacific, to the Middle East, to Europe. There are cultural aspects separate to them all, and evidently they share some particular something that makes them apt to care more about cartoons than beheadings.

There are Muslims that don't have whatever this certain something is. Brad characterizes it as a culture, and I think it is an apt comparison. It is shared, and spread, and reinforced by interaction. For some reason it tends to be much more prevalent in Islamic circles. That isn't meant to be insulting, but it seems true enough to me.

kingbee

on Mar 01, 2006

In the US, we have a base set of principles which essentially define our culture, but there are incredible variations in each locality. We still maintain certain aspects that are part of the American culture in all areas

very true. there is no similar base set of principles which defines or unifies indonesian and arabic culture. there is a common faith. same with russia and greece or latin america and spain/portugal (altho that is rapidly changing). if you wanna buy into that, then the us, the uk and all the former brit dominions are also a single unified culture.

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