Culture should be regarded as the set of distinctive spiritual, material, intellectual and emotional features of society or a social group, and that it encompasses, in addition to art and literature, lifestyles, ways of living together, value systems, traditions and beliefs. UNESCO Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity
Dana Gioia, Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, at the meeting of the U.S. National Commission on UNESCO Monday, emphasized the important difference between European and U.S. cultural policies.
European nationalism coalesced around culturally homogeneous peoples, and often emphasized common language and key cultural products such as literature or music that unified a people. Thus the nation of Italy was formed around Italian and the works of Dante, Verde and others. For these European nations, the preservation of national culture has value, and the value is not only that individuals place intrinsic value on their culture, but that common culture is a basis for national identity and cohesion. One can easily cite examples, such as that of the Basques in Spain or the Protestants in Ireland, of continuing conflict between ethnic minorities and majorities in the context of nation states. Europeans often complain about the intrusion of U.S. culture into their national cultures.
The United States has been regarded as a nation of immigrants. (Only recently has it sought to also incorporate minority ethnic groups of native Americans and Hispanics that lived on the land before the creation of the nation.) It has prospered by incorporating different ethnic groups into a unified nation state. U.S. citizens typically value cultural dynamism for itself, and have increasingly sought cultural pluralism within U.S. society.
The difference in attitudes toward cultural dynamism versus cultural continuity is exemplified by the existence of European national academies to protect the purity of national languages against the intrusion of foreign words versus the openness of American English to new words from whatever source.
Of course there are also economic values associated with cultural policies. If Francophone nations can exclude more American music, movies, and other cultural products in favor of products in French, then their cultural industries will make more money and there will be a less negative balance of payments in cultural products. This fact is not lost on those seeking profits in those national cultural industries.
The debate on cultural diversity thus involves cultural, political and economic values.
The Universal Declaration suggests a value for cultural diversity analogous to that for biological diversity. I think the analogy is not valid, but will not go into the matter here. I too value cultural diversity. The world is a richer and more interesting place for the diversity among its thousands of cultural groups.
I am writing this to point out, however, that cultural diversity is often a problem. It is a problem within nations, when cultural minorities feel that they must resort to violence against other minorities. Such a problem can lead to the violent destruction of the nation state, as occurred in the former Yugoslavia. Inter-cultural intolerance is sometimes used as an excuse for genocide, as has happened in the Holocaust, Rwanda, and Burundi. It has been the basis of wars between and among nations.
Cultural diversity also complicates development. In many nations, there are many minority languages and no single language in which all the citizens can communicate. That fact alone causes a host of (obvious) problems. Economies function best when there is trust among participants in the economies, and such trust is often hard to come by among the members of a multitude of small cultural groups, speaking different languages, within a single country.
Cultures change! I recall being impressed by the “traditional” clothes warn by a tribal group in Colombia until I learned that theirs was a new style, recently adopted from a different tribal group living in Ecuador (some hundred miles distant). It is not only hopeless, but often counterproductive to think that one can freeze a culture at a point of time. Maintaining traditional crops in the face of new crop diseases, or maintaining traditional health practices in the face of newly emergent diseases or new preventive and therapeutic technologies are obvious examples of the dangers of excessive cultural rigidity.
This is not to say that the preservation of cultural heritage is not important. I alao value continity in culture. Indeed, I would argue strongly that there is great value in allowing the members of a culture to apply their own values in the determination of the directions of cultural change. My Irish ancestry leads me to greatly distrust efforts from a foreign power to introduce cultural change for its own motives, as the British conquerors did to the Irish conquered. Indeed, I find many of the cultural intrusions promoted for commercial purposes to be objectionable (say through television advertising to children, as including many examples of especially obnoxious activities).
The question I would raise is how developing nations can foster some appropriate cultural changes that would help draw their ethnic minorities into more productive political and economic relationships and avoid the worst aspects of cultural clash and warfare? How can we promote cultural change that makes wars among nations less likely and less destructive?
As technology overcomes the tyranny of distance, and globalization increases, the interplay of cultures becomes more prevalent and indeed more inescapable. Indeed, cultural borrowing is critical to development. As Jared Diamond has pointed out (Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies), intercultural exchanges are the major source of progress, and cultural isolation is a key cause of underdevelopment.
The question is then how best to manage cultural change and cultural borrowing, not how to avoid it. How can cultures change so as to achieve universal goals, such as those the world sought to formalize in the Millennium Development Goals. How can cultures maintain their continuity so as to protect the values their members hold most dear? And how can peoples and nations best balance their efforts to assure cultural continuity with their efforts toward social and economic development and a peaceful world?
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