Source: here
Back in the day - before ‘guest workers’, mass cross-border migration and refugees became a big Hoo-Haa - it was quite common to hear people in the West talk about their dreams of traveling to distant lands to have meaningful encounters with people of different cultures.
How times change!
Today, a large and very vocal section of Western society openly shuns people with different cultures. Meet the culturally inflexible, practitioners of Culturalism, the cultural equivalent of racism. The only difference between them and racists is that racists don't like people of colour, while the culturally inflexible don't like people of other cultures.
Cultural inflexibility is at least as pervasive as racism was in, say, the United States in the 1950s and 1960s before the Civil Rights movement began to change things. Yet, most people do not even recognise that they are culturally inflexible, especially if they are part of the majority culture. Instead, they take it as entirely natural and correct that their own culture should be paramount to other cultures by virtue of their numerical superiority. It does not even occur to the culturally inflexible that their insistence on cultural hegemony is akin to apartheid, a systematic kind of discrimination that they are inflicting on fellow human beings.
Cultural inflexibility is instilled in most people from birth. It is ubiquitous. Culture is a complex system of social norms designed to encourage – and sometimes enforce - cohesion within a population, mainly for defensive purposes (for more on this see here). After a whole life of cultural indoctrination, most people’s understanding of their own cultures is usually extremely deep and personal, indeed, often so intimate as to allow people to recognise other members of their own culture at a mere glance. Their understanding of their own culture is usually only exceeded by their utter ignorance of other cultures.
The ability to quickly and reliably recognise fellow members of a culture used to be important, especially in the distant past, when most people still lived in small, isolated, and vulnerable communities. Today, however, the value of being instantly able to identify a fellow member of ones culture is largely gone. The world has become highly globalised and it is arguably more advantageous to be able to quickly and reliably connect with people from all kinds of cultures other than one's own (see here).
This is why large cities like London are so successful. Here, people hail from literally tens or even hundreds of distinct cultures, yet mingle peacefully on a daily basis in shops, on public transport, in the streets, in media and the arts, at work as well as socially. The defensive aspects of culture in a setting like London are not only obsolete; they are downright counterproductive.
Multi-cultural London (Source: here)
Those who have grown comfortable with inter-cultural mingling in a globalised world are well placed to succeed. However, globalisation has been too rapid for some groups, particularly those who live in communities with very limited exposure to other cultures. It is primarily within these culturally isolated communities we find the culturally inflexible, the big losers of our time.
Cultural inflexibility is especially pronounced among rural dwellers, in conservative communities, amid the less educated as well as among the elderly and the religious. Sometimes most or all of these characteristics are present in a single population; think Islamic fundamentalist societies in the Middle East and Central Asia or their US counterparts, the fundamentalist Christian communities in the US Midwest.
However, you also encounter serious cultural inflexibility among lower-skilled segments of the white working class in many European countries and the United States. All else even, the elderly tend to be more culturally inflexible than the young, while men tend to be worse afflicted by cultural inflexibility than women.
Culturally inflexible people are not only ignorant of, but also deeply suspicious about other cultures. Their fears make them extremely prone to political manipulation. All it takes is a bit of conspiracy theory - ideally with a few racial stereotypes thrown in for good measure - to make them erect almost insurmountable barriers between themselves and the rest of the world.
Cultural barriers are bad things. They work in much the same way as tariffs in open economies and they are just as damaging. They fragment the world, rendering human communities into small isolated enclaves that are both more vulnerable and less prosperous than they would otherwise have been had the barriers not been there.
The culturally inflexible are useful idiots. Today, ironically, it is this very feature of the culturally inflexible that has put them into the ascendency. Angry about lagging behind economically since the Global Financial Crisis of 2008/2009, the culturally inflexible have found willing representatives in Far-Right politicians, who have, as a result, become the most successful politicians in Western politics over the last three decades (for more on the downward spiral of economic and politics in Western societies see here).
Single-issue champions, Far-Right politicians have played the xenophobia card extremely successfully in order to gain power. The rest of the political spectrum has had to adopt similar policies in order not to fall behind. Most recently, even the European Union jumped on the band wagon as evidenced by the recent hostile Migration and Asylum Pact (see here).
A culturally inflexible, but useful idiot (Source: here)
They may be useful idiots, but the potential damage the culturally inflexible can cause should not to be underestimated. They are an extremely dangerous group of people. Once a clear division between “them” and “us” has been established in their feeble minds, they become dumb tools of repression and persecution, even perpetrators of violence. The people who ran the concentration camps in Nazi Germany were drawn from the pool of the culturally inflexible. The zealous flag wavers who are the first to sign up to fight for king and country when war approaches are the culturally inflexible. You can also spot them in lynch mobs by the glistening hatred in their eyes. They are the ones who attacked the US Capitol on 6 January 2021. They draw courage from being members of a group rather than from thinking for themselves.
Because they are incapable of thinking for themselves.
The End
This is part of a series of blog posts about the dark side of culture. Previous instalments include: