Culture is a broad concept comprising the ideas, customs, and social behaviour of a people or society. It encompasses arts, beliefs, and institutions, which, while dynamic, are often passed down the generations.
Culture finds expression in codes of conduct, manners, dress, language, class, cuisine, caste, religion, rituals, and creative arts, such as painting, music, and sculpture.
Beneath these expressions lies a shared set of values, which allows culture to act like a glue that unites people around a collective identity.
Sharing values and a collective identity engender familiarity and trust, which in turn contributes to the maintenance of order and security among members of the culture, for example by creating a sense of safety in numbers.
For this reason, culture is also very closely linked to politics, which explains why governments in many countries overtly sponsor culture, such as cultural celebrations, museums, and the academic study of culture via the formal disciplines of archaeology, social anthropology, classics, music, sculpture, painting, the history of art, and others.
On account of the pleasures of art and the sense of belonging created by culture, many people automatically assume that culture is a pure and unambiguously positive thing.
Yet, culture also has a dark side, which is given far less recognition. The rest of this note aims to highlight some of the aspects of the dark side of culture, including some of its obvious manifestations.
Let us start at the level of the individual. It should be fairly obvious that culture restricts the freedom of its members by imposing limits on the range of acceptable behaviours within the often narrow and rigorously enforced social or religious parameters of a culture's values.
For example, Scandinavians tend to place a higher value on equality than, say, Americans, but this preference has a clear cost in terms of, say, restricting individuals' financial freedom, since Scandinavia taxes the rich more than Americans do in order to level the social playing field. The proof that Scandinavia's preference for more equality relative to the US is fully embedded in culture is reflected in the fact that Scandinavian taxation structures and the priorities for public spending are not only radically different from those of the US, but, importantly, also sustained over very long periods (think decades, not years). In other words, individual voters in Scandinavia are content to pay more tax and spend more on the poor than Amrican voters.
At the level of the population, the strong cultural cohesion often manifests itself in an equally strong mistrust of, collective ignorance about, and prejudice about members of other cultures. Indeed, non-conformists and/or members of minority cultures are often discriminated against or entirely ostracised. As such, culture has the power to create serious divisions between nations.
Why are these dark sides of culture never given the same recognition as culture’s many and often-touted good sides?
The reason is that societies tend to be loath to criticise their own practices, especially since culture is so integral to many peoples’ sense of identity. In other words, criticising one’s own culture can literally be like aiming criticism at one self.
At the time, it is extremely easy - and often entirely socially acceptable and very prevalent even in public - to criticise other cultures. For example, you do not need to take many bus journeys in, say, Copenhagen before you overhear overtly Islamophobic conversations, even in the presence of Muslims. The content of such conversations can be rather spicy. So spicy, in fact, that if you heard similar words uttered about Jews you could be forgiven for thinking you were back in Nazi Germany in the 1930s.
Marginalisation of alien populations on cultural grounds is omnipresent in the Western economies and in many other parts of the world. Culture-based discrimination shows up as discriminatory treatment of women, ethnic and religious minorities, the youngest as well as the oldest, the disabled, and the less educated in many realms of society, especially the labour market.
Take the banal example of the priesthood, a truly cultural profession. To this day, it is still the official policy of the Catholic Church that women cannot be ordained as priests. Yet, women are allowed to work as pastors in other branches of Christianity, such as the Lutheran Church and other protestant denominations. How can the starkly different treatment of women in different branches of Christianity be classified as anything other than culture-based discrimination?
It stands to reason that societies that exercise discrimination in labour markets on cultural grounds are not operating at their economic optimum; they are clearly not allocating their talents efficiently. But how big a problem is cultural discrimination?
As it happens, a number of studies have calculated the cost to society of cultural discrimination and when tallied across all economies and all types of discrimination the cost is truly staggering. Take the 2016 OECD study for example. OECD estimated that gender-based discrimination alone costs the world some USD 12 trillion, or 16% of global income GDP (see here).
A 2021 Harvard University study of racism towards Black Americans put the cost at USD 800bn per annum, or about 3.5% of 2021 US GDP (See here).
A 2020 study by Citibank reached a similar estimate (See here).
Of course, the true costs of culture-based discrimination extend far beyond the relatively narrow realm of economics. Due to the ease with which politicians exploit cultural differences to suppress members of other cultures, cultural discrimination has been used to inflict truly horrific atrocities on other people over and over throughout history.
Religious and political persecutions are often perpetrated with the formal backing of churches and/or state institutions. They have produced some of the worst human rights abuses, war, and genocide known to man. Here are some examples:
Catholics and Protestants killed upwards of 8 million people during the Thirty Years’ War in the name of religion.
Adolf Hitler and the Nazis in Germany killed some 6 million Jews after having made the case for their extermination with surprisingly little pushback from a German population humiliated by the Treaty of Versailles.
Up to 25 million Asians were victimised by Japan’s ideas of cultural superiority during World War II.
Hindus and Muslims committed multiple genocides on each other during the post-independence Partition of the Indian Dominion.
Pol Pot’s genocide in Cambodia led to the deaths of 2 million people in the name of class war.
Hutu leaders in Rwanda induced ordinary people to murder a million Tutsis in the mid-1990s on ethnic grounds.
In 2016-17, the military of Myanmar exploited ethnic and culutural divisions to inflict genocide against the Rohingya minority with broad popular backing from other sections of Myanmar society.
Culture-based abuse continues in varying degrees of intensity to this day. During his term as president of the United States, US President Donald Trump had no qualms about removing children of migrants from Central America, while such a policy would have amounted to political suicide had it been applied to the children of white people. Meanwhile, European Union (EU) member states and the United Kingdom openly discriminate against refugees from Africa, while favouring Ukrainian refugees account of the latter’s greater similarity with Western European cultural values. For a recent manifestation of EU's immigration policy, see here).
Most recently, Israelis’ hatred of Palestinians and the West’s widespread bias against Muslim populations go a long way towards explaining why the outrage against the obvious excesses of the Israeli Defence Forces in Gaza has been so modest.
In summary, there are probably not any cultures on Earth, which cannot identify horrendous atrocities they have perpetrated against members of other cultures. There are at least as many ugly manifestations of culture as beautiful ones, but the ugly ones tend to be far more impactful than the beautiful ones, because whenever culture-based hatred is involved the wars, genocides, mass rapes, and ethnic cleansing are particularly bad, because culture makes everything more personal for the participants.
Given the enormous costs that culture inflicts on society, it would clearly be desirable to be able to identify the specific conditions under which cultures dark sides manifest themselves. To see if this possible, it is first necessary to understand whether darkness is simply to culture itself, in which case we may not be able to do anything about the associated violence, or whether the dark sides of culture are somehow coaxed into existence, for example, through the interaction between culture and politics. In other words, we need to explore the origin of culture itself. The next instalment in this series looks more closely at the questions why we have culture in the first place and why cultures are so different (see here).
The End