Culture Clash

The rioting in France is on my mind this week.

Anthropologist Roger Sandall has lots of writing that feels significant to the conversation. In the excerpts below, he reviewed an apparently prescient text from 1962 by Karl Popper called The Open Society and Its Enemies. Reading this review makes think I'd really like to bring back the dichotomy "tribal" and "modern civilization". I think it would contribute so much toward making sense of the confusing world we live in...

We can all be glad [if] we live in nations that are commercially prosperous, cosmopolitan, and democratic. We can agree that a free-trading nation in a free-trading world, with representative government, an independent judiciary, and liberty of thought, association, and expression, is a very fine thing indeed. Popper more than once appeals to the stirring oration in which the Athenian leader Pericles proudly boasted that "Our city is thrown open to the world; we never expel a foreigner..."

But what do you do after you have thrown your city open to the world, only to find you have let in enemies who not only decline to assimilate, but want to destroy it? When these same destroyers have been given all the rights of law-abiding citizens—including the cultural right to be as disagreeably hostile as they wish?

In this next bit, I'm not as much reminded of the (apparently non-religious) rioters as to Islamist extremists:

It is a curious fact that there is no mention of Islam in The Open Society, and no indication whatever that it might emerge as one of the ‘enemies’ of open societies in the years to come. But Popper would have had no trouble recognising what is happening in Europe now. Metastasising cells of unassimilable jihadis, often united by language and ethnicity, driven by irrational resentments, galled by their failure to cope with modern life and feeling “the strain of civilization in their bones, hating an imagined exclusion and fearing a suspected inferiority, inspired by a debased fundamentalism more concerned to kill than convert, fortified by prophecy, and aggressively promoting a sacred text containing all one needs to know this manifestly represents “arrested tribalism” in its current form today.

As for the rioters, I don't think the problem is in this case literally their (formerly) tribal society. I think it's the collapse of tribal culture upon arrival into the modern world, and a failure to fill that void with the values of modern civilization. (By the way, I'm not denying that the liberal explanations for the riots such as racism and exclusionism exist. Surely discrimination and deep economic disparities fuel the flames of frustration and isolation. I just don't agree that's the ultimate source of the problems.)

One reason Sandall endeared himself to me so thoroughly is that he is an anthropologist and therefore by definition something of an expert on culture. Yet he does not fall prey to the horrible ideal that is pretty much the foundation of contemporary anthropology, which is that all cultures are equal. Here Sandall describes a book he wrote that I can't wait to read:

The Culture Cult is about romantic primitivism-—the belief that traditional ethnic cultures provide a better home for humanity, more fair, more healthy, more harmonious, than today's free and open civilization.

In fact, traditional cultures usually have most of the following: domestic oppression, endemic disease, poverty, clan enmity, violence, religious intolerance, and severe artistic constraints. If you want to live a full life, then modern civilization, not romantic ethnicity, deserves your thoughtful vote.

It's definitely got mine.