smudge wrote:
Aristophanes, I'm uncomfortable with the assumption that having people from quite different cultures immigrating would necessarily be a good thing. There would surely be big clashes. It's assumed they would respect the culture they're immigrating to. Why is that assumed?
It's also assumed that your culture isn't already good enough, and needs immigrants so it doesn't go stale. Does that mean instability and friction is a good thing? I would rather have strong stability. Why the putting-down of your culture? Why is theirs something they can't help, but yours is something to be ashamed of because it isn't good enough?
What I see is being said, is that in history immigration was a good thing, and that in order to keep a culture from going stale, having culture clashes and maybe even war would be better than that. I don't understand.
Historical perspective:
The Greek culture the West holds as it's foundation was actually a mix-mash of competing cultures circa 500 b.c., right before the Classical Greek Era (namely Athens and it's league), Greek pottery was a modification of Etruscan pottery and Persian art, Kouros statues that paved the way for free standing classical Greek statues were borrowed from the Egyptians, and even their mythology has it's origins in proto-Thracian culture. The Greeks didn't invent these things, cultural exchange brought these things to Greece and they modified them into something better. Innovation doesn't just happen on it's own, it takes outside challenges to drive that innovation. Even Adam Smith accepted this as an argument for capitalism.
Take the Romans, they were a backwards almost barbarian culture until they had 200 years of influence from the Greeks of Syracuse, after which point they learned and adapted, borrowing much of Greek culture and merging it with their own. The early Roman legion that people feared so much was merely a modified version of the Greek phalanx, not to mention their architecture and art were clones of the Greeks, and their superb engineering wouldn't have been possible without Greek and Egyptian maths.
The Dark Ages in Europe were a terrible time for innovation, virtually nothing was written, the countries were isolationist and clannish, that lack of mixing created a system where innovation barely moved forward, if at all, it could be argued the previous Roman engineering and art was superior to the Dark Age culture that followed. Then voila, Constantinople fell, a trove of ancient Greco-Roman knowledge crossed the Mediterranean sea to Italy and the Renaissance was born which paved the way for the Enlightenment, and thus much of the advances of today.
That's what cultural exchange does: moves things forward.
Now, let's look at the consequences of not answering that challenge. Each one of those cultures I mentioned before also reached a high point where they were the dominant force in their region. The Greeks after Alexander, the four league period, saw the rest of the world as barbaric and inferior, they contracted their trade to the Greek sphere, they cut off ties with their distance city-states (Syracuse being a prime example), within 200 years of Alexander the Greeks had been out innovated and out maneuvered by the 'barbaric' Romans whom rapidly consumed land and ideas from across the Mediterranean. Likewise the height of Rome lasted nearly 500 years, but starting with the tetrachy period under Diocletian Rome slowly started to disintegrate, much can be said for the corruption of that period, but also of note is that they restricted travel to and from their vassal states since the economy was weak and it was easy to blame the foreigners for the problems. Until that point Rome was a vibrant city that had everything from Nubians to a few Indian travelers, not to mention Romans. As those new ideas stopped Rome suffocated itself. Again, within 200 years of this time period the Gothic tribes in Southern and Western Germany had learned from the Romans, especially militarily, fused it with their own and created forces the Romans just couldn't adapt to.
Another example is Egypt, perhaps the ancient culture most notorious for it's lack of change. Starting ~1000 B.C. Egypt was rattled by a series of attacks from the Sea People, while they repulsed those attacks, they also closed down trade in the region fearing their trade had enticed the Sea People to attack. Within 100 years the Phoenicians had taken over that trade, and encompassed Egypt on all sides, and the Egyptians were forced to be a pseudo-vassal state: autonomous, but always at the whim of what the Phoenicians wanted to do. Eventually Persia arose, and crushed Egypt in a war that took merely a month (according to Persian sources, so that's highly debatable). The Persians came at the Egyptians with bronze weaponry they couldn't match (a metal the Egyptians knew about and had used in their past, but didn't have the resources to create anymore because again, they gave up international trade). After the Persians were defeated by Alexander, it got even worse for the Egyptians since the Greeks decided to take away autonomous rule and replaced pharaohs and aristocracy with Greek rulers. The downward spiral continued when Rome came along and eventually deposed the Greek pharaohs, not to mention the entire religion and culture in the place. Such is the cost of isolationism.
It's not that a culture is inherently wrong or good enough or any such value judgement, it's that things change whether you pay attention to them or not. If you bury your head in the sand and ignore cultural exchange you run a very high risk of your culture be consumed by another culture that's adapted to those around them and borrowed ideas from others. Evolution happens whether we like it or not, best to be proactive on that front as opposed to reactive.
26 May 2017, 9:36 am
