The Dark Side of Culture (1): Darkness

High culture: Saturn eats his son (Source: here)

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, literature, music, and sculpture.

Beneath these expressions lies a shared set of values, which enables culture to act like a glue that unites people around a collective identity.

Sharing the same values and forging a collective identity engender familiarity and trust, which in turn contribute to the maintenance of order and security among members of cultures, for example by creating a sense of safety in numbers.

The capacity of culture to bind communities together makes it very useful from a political perspective. It is no coincidence that governments in many countries overtly sponsor cultural celebrations, museums, and the academic study of culture via formal disciplines such as archaeology, social anthropology, classics, music, sculpture, painting, the history of art, religious studies, and others.

Due to the many pleasures that derive from the arts and the sense of community associated with belonging to a culture, most people automatically assume that culture is an unambiguously positive thing. However, culture also has extreme dark sides, which are given far less recognition. This note, the first in a series, highlights the dark aspects of culture.

The dark sides of culture manifest themselves both at the level of the individual and at community level.

Individual members of cultures tend to incur a loss of freedom, because they have to operate within the set of acceptable social or religious norms that define the culture in question. These norms are often enforced by the community itself, although in many cases by governments as well. For example, Afghan women are heavily restricted in terms of how they can dress and act due to the strict religious norms enforced not just by the community, but also by the Taliban government ruling Afghanistan at this time.

It is not just Islamic cultures that restrict the behaviour of their members. In Scandinavia, the dominant culture places greater value on equality than in, say, the United States, but to attain greater equality Scandinavian societies impose economic penalties on individuals in the form of higher taxes, so the state can afford to take care of the less well-off. By contrast, the culture of the United States assigns greater value to individual freedom, which means that social safety nets are more porous and the less well-off are rendered more vulnerable.

In both these examples, the values are very widely accepted and highly resilient to change. The clearest indication that Scandinavia's higher tax burden is grounded in values rather than short-term political opportunism is that Scandinavians have accepted higher tax rates than Americans over very long periods of time (decades rather than years). In other words, paying tax to reduce inequality in Scandinavia has very broad social backing, regardless of the cost to the individual tax payer, while the opposite is true in the United States.

Strong cultural values often give rise to mistrust of, collective ignorance about, and prejudice against members of other cultures. Non-conformist natives and members of alien or minority cultures often face discrimination or outright ostracism at the hands of members of the dominant culture. The tendency cultures to be mistrustful of each other is easily exploited for political purposes and can lead to very bad outcomes.

The loss of personal freedom and persecution of minorities by dominant cultures are rarely labelled as cultural problems. Instead, they are usually ascribed to political failures or attributed the external circumstances. Societies are loath to criticise their own cultural values and practices. After all, this would amount to aiming criticism at one self, since culture is so integral to peoples’ sense of identity that many people would struggle to distinguish between their personal values and values of their cultural community.

Yet, at the same time, many cultures find it socially acceptable to be critical of other cultures. Occasionally, I take the bus, when I am in Copenhagen. I never fail to overhear overtly Islamophobic conversations, even in the presence of Muslims. A strong anti-Islamic element has made inroads into Danish culture over the past few decades to the point, where it is now socially acceptable to make utterances about Muslims in public that are so extreme they would not seem out of place in Nazi Germany in the late 1930s had they been about Jews.

Discrimination against members of minority cultures is pervasive in the Western societies as well as in many other parts of the world. Culture-based discrimination shows up in the mistreatment of women, in the ostracisation of ethnic and religious minorities, in the unfair treatment of the young as well as the elderly, and in marginalisation of the disabled and the less educated.

Culture-based discrimination is also rife in the labour market. Take the banal example of the priesthood. Given religion's obvious cultural roots, the priesthood is one of the purest culture-based professions. To this day, it is still official policy of the Catholic Church to not ordain women as priests, while women work as pastors in other branches of Christianity, including the Lutheran Church and other protestant denominations. The chauvinism against women within the Catholic Church is a clear example of pure culture-based discrimination.

Collectively, societies pay a heavy price for culturally intolerance. Labour markets that discriminate on cultural grounds fail to allocate jobs based on talent, so they are by definition inefficient. A 2016 OECD study 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 put the cost of racism towards Black Americans at USD 800bn per annum, or about 3.5% of 2021 US GDP (see here). A 2020 study of racism by Citibank reached a similar conclusion (see here).

Of course, the full cost of culture-based discrimination is far greater than these economic studies suggest, because economic studies tend not to count non-quantifiable costs, including humiliation, alienation, broken dreams, not to mention violence and death. There is probably not a single culture on Earth, whose members have not at some point perpetrated a horrendous atrocity against members of another culture.

Israel is an interesting example. Israel was formed purely on cultural grounds, with the intention of giving a homeland to people belonging to the Jewish culture following the atrocities against Jews at the hands of the Nazis during World War II. Ironically, Israelis are now doing to Palestinians what was done to them by the Nazis. Israeli hatred of Palestinians has so far resulted in the death of more than 60,000 Palestinians in Gaza and may yet cost them their homeland. Most of the Palestinian victims are women and children. The West's tolerance of the Israeli genocide is also rooted cultural prejudice; the West would never have been tolerated the genocide had the victims been Jews or Christians. Israel gets away with awful killings of completely innocent people every single day due to strong European and US prejudices against Arabs and Muslims.

Indeed, culture-based discrimination has produced some of the most egregious human rights abuses known to mankind. Whenever culture is invoked in conflict, the fallout tends to be extra gruesome, including horrific torture, indiscriminate targeting of civilians, genocide, mass rapes, and ethnic cleansing. Culture-based conflicts are particularly gruesome, because perpetrators assume their cultural rather than individual identities and therefore act to avenge all victims within their own culture and do so attacking all members of the offending culture.

Moreover, culture-based atrocities are often committed with the explicit and formal backing of churches and/or state institutions due to the ease with which politicians and religious leaders exploit cultural prejudices in order to generate popular backing for persecution of minorities. There are too such horrific state or church sponsored culture-based atrocities to list them all here, but below is a list of some well-known ones:

• Catholics and Protestants killing upwards of 8 million people in the name of religion during the Thirty Years’ War.

• Adolf Hitler and the Nazis killing some 6 million Jews after making the case for their extermination with surprisingly little pushback from a German population humiliated by World War I and the Treaty of Versailles.

• Japan victimising upwards of 25 million Asians during World War II on the basis of delusions of cultural superiority.

• Hindus and Muslims committing multiple genocides on each other due to religious differences during Partition of the Indian Dominion.

• Pol Pot murdering 2 million Cambodians in the name of Maoism and Nationalism.

• Serb Nationalists committing horrendous atrocities against Muslims during the 1990s Balkan Wars, including ethnic cleansing, concentration camps, torture, and widespread sexual violence.

• Hutu leaders in Rwanda convincing ordinary people to murder a million Tutsis in the mid-1990s on ethnic grounds.

• The military of Myanmar exploiting ethnic and religious prejudices among the Burmese people to inflict genocide against the Rohingya minority, with broad popular backing and support from the government and prominent leaders, including Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi.

In between these particularly gratuitous outrages, cultural discrimination takes place to varying degrees every day everywhere around us. During his first term as president of the United States, Donald Trump removed children from immigrant mothers from Central America, a policy so ugly that it would have resulted in instant political suicide had it been applied to white Americans. However, because the victims were not members of the American culture there was no broad-based social uproar against the policy in the United States.

To this day, member states of the European Union (EU) and the United Kingdom openly discriminate against refugees from Africa, while they favour Ukrainian refugees. Why? Because Ukrainian culture is far more similar Western European culture than African culture (for more on EU's immigration policy see here).

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Are the dark sides of culture intrinsic to culture? If so, maybe there is nothing that can be done to reduce the enormous economic and human costs associated with culture-based conflicts. On the other hand, if the dark sides are somehow coaxed into existence then there may be ways to curb the worst excesses. The next instalment of this series is titled 'The Dark Side of Culture (2): The Origins of Culture'. It explores how culture first evolved and shows that culture quite early began to assume a defensive role. The third instalment of the series - 'The Dark Side of Culture (3): Politics and Culture', explores how the defensive features in many cultures lend themselves to easy politic exploitation. Truly large-scale culture-based disasters, it turns out, usually occur only after political leaders and church leaders get involved.

The End