Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions

UNESCO's 2005 convention may well have been advanced by the Francophone communities anxiious to protect their creative industries from the threats of the Anglophone creative industries, but received wide support from peoples all over the world who feel that not only are their quaint old ways being threatened but even their most closely held values.

On the other hand, it seems to me that there is a lot of silliness embodied in the dogooders who become emotional over any picturesque tribe or custom. This rant is occassioned by an article regretting that a tribe in the Amazon is going to have to change its culture because its environment is changing and it will starve to death if it does not find new ways to feed itself. I suggest that with the population growth predicted for the rest of this century, mankind is also going to have to find new ways to feed itself if we are to avoid famine.

Let me illustrate the point. U.S. culture differs from that of Western Europe in many ways. Here are some of the expressions of that difference:

• We spend twice as much on health services but have lower life expectancy.
• We murder each other more often, and keep guns in our homes for protection from each other more often.
• We use a lot more oil and contribute a lot more to global warming than do the Europeans.
• We are more prejudiced against blacks and Hispanics.
• We spend more on the military. more frequently invade other countries, and over the past half century have been more often at war.

I can see why the Europeans might wish not to be more like us in these ways, but why should we not seek to be more like the Europeans?

More seriously, cultures change. They have also changed as one rubs up against another. Peoples acquire memes from their neighbors, adapt and integrate them into their own cultures, and move on. I has long seemed to me that the real issue is whether a people can choose whether and how to adopt a meme. The Japanese, who adopted and then abandoned firearms, seeem to me to be masters of socially making decisions as to what they wish to adopt and what they wish to retain of their historic culture. I would love it were Americans more like the Japanese in this way.