Cultured people (Source: El Espanol)
The previous two parts of this multi-part series on culture established that culture has ubiquitous, pervasive, and impactful dark sides (see here), but that the dark sides lack genetic basis, wherefore they should, in principle, be amendable to policy interventions (see here).
The truth is that politics usually explains why some cultural encounters result in violence, while others give rise to peaceful and even prosperity-enhancing outcomes. Politics is incredibly impactful, because our cultural lives are more prone to political exploitation than any other aspect of human existence.
Why are our cultural lives so vulnerable to political exploitation? The reason is that our cultural attachment is characterised - in most people at least - by a profound fundamental asymmetry: people are usually extremely familiar with their own culture, but grotesquely ignorant about other cultures.
This asymmetry is strikingly similar to football fandom (itself a cultural phenomenon, of course). Football fans exhibit irrational loyalty towards their own club, even when it performs abysmally. Football fans also tend to harbour suspicion and dislike towards other clubs.
Cultural attachment works exactly the same way. In fact, culture is so deeply ingrained that many people can barely tell where their cultural heritage ends and their individual personality begins! Most people’s exposures to and knowledge of other cultures are also minimal. And ignorance breeds contempt.
It is a sobering thought that the asymmetry is universal, so the potential for extreme violence along cultural lines is latent everywhere, all the time.
The fundamental asymmetry between own and alien cultures is so large that it takes very little political manipulation to divide people along cultural lines. Usually, all that's required for tempers to rise is for a politician to stoke fears that someone's culture is under threat from members of another culture. And, as it happens, violence has erupted along cultural lines over and over again throughout history due to political exploitation.
Romulus Augustus, the last Roman emperor (Source: https://catflag.wordpress.com)
The cycles of political exploitation of culture probably date back as long as societies have had social organisation. To pick a starting point, let us go back to Roman times. The early period of the Roman Empire was a religiously pluralistic society. Rome initially adopted as a matter of policy a practice of absorbing rather than eradicating other cultures. Rome saw this as the most effective way to maintain stability, because, logically, allowing groups to preserve their traditions helps to promote stability. Not coincidentally, this also happened to be Rome’s most successful period. The main cultural challenge during this time was monotheistic Judaism, which posed a challenge not because Rome was intolerant, but because Judaism was.
Then everything changed.
The Roman Republic fell. Emperors usurped absolute power. From this moment onwards, Rome increasingly turned to Christian monotheism. The reasons were practical and intensely political: the emperors found that a single religion could far more easily be exploited in the exercise of authoritarian control and building personality cults than a plethora of small and disparate religions. By the year 391, Rome was formally a monotheistic state. And one hundred years later the Roman empire was gone.
Rome was followed by the so-called Dark Ages (500-900). Contrary to popular perception, the Dark ages were characterised by a virtual explosion of advances in disparate areas, such as universities, mechanical clocks, and the printing press. These advances were possible due to the profound decentralisation of power and associated blossoming of cultural diversity that occurred after the fall of Rome. Specifically, it was the relaxation of Rome’s strangle-hold on culture that allowed human creativity and knowledge to flourish.
But the next cycle of political abuse and cultural repression was soon to manifest itself. As reactionary forces took hold, the erstwhile blossoming of cultural freedom and decentralisation gave way to a re-concentration of power, which eventually lasted some 600 years until 1500. This period is what we today call Feudalism. It proved deeply culturally regressive as culture was put into the pay of forces seeking to concentrate power into fewer hands, the feudal lords. Rigorous social structures were introduced that froze people into narrowly defined roles: sons had to succeed their fathers in trades, councillors were forbidden from resigning, and peasants had to remain on the land to which they were attached as serfs. Vassals provided lords with military support in exchange for land. Progress stopped.
Fortunately, feudalism was, like other repressive regimes, fundamentally fragile. Feudalism was brought to its knees when the Black Death killed an enormous number of labourers and the crusades killed an enormous number of lords.
The collapse of Feudalism left a vacuum, which created opportunities for absolute monarchs to grab more power. While the rise of absolute monarchs would appear at first sight to represent a further concentration of power, this was in fact not the case, because after the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 kings obtained sovereign authority over their territories, which was the first appearance of the concept of the modern state. This introduced the idea that rule of law would be granted in exchange for a state monopoly on violence.
The Westphalia system was a massive step forward towards human liberty compared to previous idiosyncratic authoritarian systems. For one, papal authority rapidly declined in this period as secular kings proved more credible, legitimate, and immediate in terms of their effectiveness than Popes, especially in lands far from Rome.
The introduction of institutions of government under the Westphalia system changed everything from the grassroots and up, ushering in a blossoming of cultural diversity and tolerance. France offers the most colourful illustration of this change. Like Roman emperors, the French absolute monarchs, such as Louis XIV, made extensive use of culture to support their personality cults. Louis XIV took this to a new extreme by seeking to dominate all European culture as a matter of policy – in effect seeking to reinforce a de facto royal religion through culture. During his reign, state control of culture reached unprecedented heights as academies for the arts and sciences were established with the sole purpose of producing heroic depictions of the Louis XIV. Expressions deemed to be incompatible with this purpose were heavily censored.
But the ground was shifting beneath the feet of Louis XIV and his successors. Technical progress and imperialism were both advancing rapidly and fuelling the rise of a mercantilist class, which began to accumulate wealth and influence. Even as the excesses of Louis XIV steadily impoverished the masses, the mercantilist class became more and more powerful and vocal in its opposition to the stifling, conservative spirit of absolute monarchy.
Absolute monarchy also sat uneasily alongside the remarkable progress being made in the sciences and commerce, exploration, and discoveries at this time.
Today, we call this eruption of intellectual energy – painting, writing and philosophy – the Enlightenment. It steadily chipped away at the glorification of royal power.
Finally, in 1789, the revolution finally guillotined the French monarchy. Some seventy-two years later, Russia ended serfdom, marking the final conclusion to the era absolute monarchy.
There were many more cycles of political exploitation of culture with stagnation followed by cultural blossoming and progress. The age of empire can and ended, slavery came and went, the industrial revolution happened, labour gained more rights, and women’s won liberation. Nor will the cycles stop. Homosexuals and people belong to other minorities will fight and win and then it will be the turn of immigrants.
The consistent thesis running through all these cycles is that periods of tyranny tend to go hand in hand with manipulation of culture for political purposes. Periods with tyranny and cultural repression are always regressive, although they produced nice castles! By contrast, the periods with greatest advances may be less spectacular architecturally, but they have been far more important for human welfare and freedom. Periods of freedom are either ended by rising tyrants, or themselves end ageing tyrannies. The endless cycles are the only things that never change.
Danish tribalism (Source: CityAM)
Let us now leave the historical perspective and instead cast our glance at a cross-section of the cultural world in the present day. The cross-country perspective is particularly useful to illustrate why the interaction between culture and politics produces violence in some societies and peaceful and prosperous relations in others.
Specifically, let us look at the relationship between culture and politics in two contemporary, but very different settings, namely tribal relations in Sub-Saharan Africa and the treatment of immigrants from foreign cultures in Denmark. As we shall see, the basic dynamics of culture and politics in these very different settings are basically identical. In both cases, the extent to which politicians are able to exploit cultural attachments depend on how easily politicians are able to form viable coalitions along cultural lines.
Yet, the relationship between culture and politics is not simple linear one. It is not the case, for example, that greater cultural diversity leads to more political exploitation and hence more culture-based violence. Rather, the relationship is non-linear with very low levels of culture-based violence in both completely culturally homogenous and highly culturally diverse societies.
To understand this insight, which may seem counter-intuitive to some, it is critical to recognise that political action based on culture is only possible, when large and stable coalitions can be formed in favour or against some specific action. The greater the diversity of cultures within a society the greater the difficulty in building large and stable coalitions along cultural lines. After all, it is a bit like herding cats.
On the other hand, if a society is dominated by one large cultural group then forming a coalition is very easy, because only one group has to convinced about a certain political action. Similarly, when there is only a small number of larger cultural groups that can work together then coalitions can also more easily be formed. The reason is simply that coalition-building and maintenance of coalitions are far easier when there are only a few big players. These theoretical ideas apply in all societies, regardless of their levels of income. Take the example of Sub-Saharan African cultures. Empirical research on the contribution of ethnic-linguistic fractionalisation (a euphemism for tribalism) to civil unrest in Sub-Saharan Africa has shown that the ability to exploit cultural diversity for political purposes depends critically on the number of ethnic groups within a given society (see here). Specifically, the research shows that tribalism – a purely cultural phenomenon – is only a problem in Sub-Saharan Africa when the number of ethnic groups is very small, so that competing ethnic groups have a realistic chances of gaining overall political control.
Such conditions exist in some countries, but not in others. In Rwanda and Kenya, for example, Hutus and Tutsis and Luos and Kikuyus, respectively, each have realistic possibilities of gaining overall control. It is therefore not surprising that these two countries have been marred by repeated episodes of major tribal conflicts. By contrast, there have been very few ethnic tensions in neighbouring Tanzania, which has more than 100 relatively small ethnic groups. It is simply too complex to build coalitions in favour of cultural violence when the number of cultures is so large.
Ethnic groups in Tanzania (source here)
Of course, the lower level of tribal violence in Tanzania does not mean that Tanzanians are somehow more tolerant people than, say, Kenyans or Rwandans. The reason why Tanzania has less violence is simply that there are so many more tribal groups, each of why may have the same prejudices against other groups, but because they are different it is far more challenging to unite them into a viable coalitions against any one particular group.
Now let us consider the relationship between culture and politics in a rich country. Denmark is good example, because it is not only extremely wealthy, but also highly culturally homogenous. For reasons explained elsewhere (see here), Denmark pursues very strict policies of cultural integration.
Immigrants to Denmark are encouraged to become Danish, but not just in the sense of assuming Danish nationality, but also ditching their own cultural values and replacing them with Danish values instead.
Due to the strong dominance of the Danish culture in the country, Denmark is able to impose such culturally coercive policies. Needless to say, however, the Danish government's coercive cultural policies are not going down well with immigrants. Especially young immigrants and children of immigrants find the requirement that they give up their own cultural identities deeply offensive and humiliating. If history is a good guide - see here - then perhaps Denmark should consider a more flexible approach. Gengihs Khan and the early Romans would certainly have frowned on current Danish immigration policies.
In conclusion, politics seem to play a critical role exposing the dark side of culture. Politics and culture have interacted to produce disasters countless times through human history. They do so across countries today too, despite vast differences in levels of income and other country-specific characteristics.
Cycles of repressions in human history have almost always involved cultural repression. As such, it is likely that indicators of cultural oppression could make reliable early indicators of approaching tyranny.
Culturally heterogenous and culturally homogenous societies tend to be stable, but cultural heterogenous societies tend to be freer, more dynamic, and ultimately more resilient. This is because they allow culturally distinct groups to retain their identities. The greater variety of skills available in diverse societies tend to make for more peaceful, prosperous, and resilient societies, all else even.
What can be done to encourage greater cultural understanding in order to minimise the vulnerability of cultural societies to political manipulation? Here are three fairly simple ideas: First, make it much more costly for politicians to lie, since lying is so integral to the vilification of cultural minorities (see here). Second, minimise the negative externality of culture-based discrimination using taxation and subsidies. For example, why not give tax breaks to interracial couples in order to encourage the greater intimacy that seems to be required in order to break down cultural prejudice? A related idea would be to subsidise schools in accordance with their ethnic diversity - more ethnic diversity, more subsidies. Third, countries should deliberately seek to enter into larger political entities, since it is far more difficult to build coalitions along cultural lines when the number of cultural groups is large. Let us not forget that this is why the European Union was formed after World War II had shown us just how badly things can go wrong when the dark side of culture is ignored.
The End