"From Mina the pilgrims went to the Grand Mosque at Mecca, where they circled seven times the cube-shaped Kaaba that Muslims around the world turn to when praying.
"It was there that Sheikh Abdel Rahman al-Sudais, at times choking back tears of emotion, urged the world's Muslims to unite and shun Western traditions and materialism.
"Warning that 'globalization' could lead to 'Western domination of the Islamic nation,' he called on God to bless Muslims and destroy the enemies of Islam.
"'Oh God destroy the aggressors, the Zionists (Israelis)... Save al-Aqsa Mosque (in Jerusalem) from the claws of Zionists and Jews,' he said."
Is al-Sudais merely fueling the fires of fanatacism, or is cultural "globalization" a fact of our collective life?
[Edited to correct a spelling error, bah!]
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Dane
"Mathematicians have long held that a million monkeys banging on a million keyboards would eventually reproduce the collected wisdom of the human race. Now, thanks to the internet, we know this is not true." -- Robert Silensky
[This message has been edited by Dane Simri (edited March 16, 2000).]
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"When You're Up to Your Ass in Alligators, Today Is the First Day of the Rest of Your Life."
-- Management slogan, Ridcully-style (Terry Pratchett, The Last Continent, Discworld)
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Prakesh's Star Trek Site
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"If a nail is driven into the wrong place, it would be foolish indeed to become angry with the hammer." - Old Russian Proverb
Hey, back in college when the campus held their annual (or more often, if there was any crisis on campus) 'heritage and cultural fair,' my main source of pleasure was going to all the booths wearing my Borg T-shirt that said "YOUR CULTURE WILL BE ASSIMILATED." Which was my response to most questions put to me.
"Your primitive culture is unable to resist us." "You will adapt to service us." "Diversity is irrelevant."
Needless to say, I wasn't all that popular.
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"Nobody knows this, but I'm scared all the time... of what I might do, if I ever let go." -- Michael Garibaldi
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Frank's Home Page
"This spontaneous stuff takes a little bit of planning." - John Flansburgh
If a "world culture" ever develops, it will be a heterogenous admixture of world-wide similarities and local differences. The fact that people all over the world wear Nike shoes or eat (occasionally) at McDonald's is not indicative of anything more than marketing success.
If there is any aspect of world culture that appeals to me, it is the possibility that we will discover more to draw us together than drives us apart.
--Baloo
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"Sometimes "dark" is just a way of saying you�ve nothing to add, only a new way to subtract."
--James Lileks
http://www.geocities.com/cyrano_jones.geo/
The big problem with the "cultural amalgamation" thing is that it doesn't take into account all the stuff that people value more than hamburgers than shoes, such as relgion, the amount of power government should have, and so on.
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Frank's Home Page
"This spontaneous stuff takes a little bit of planning." - John Flansburgh
Baloo, I think you may be misinterpreting me somewhat. The popularity of McDonalds in Russia is indicative of cultural amalgamation, but no more or less so than the existance of Chinese restaurants in Brazil or Italian restaurants in Saudi Arabia. The popularity of country music in France is inticative, but no more or less so than the popularity of techno (which has its roots in Germany) in the USA. My point is that, as "people choose aspects of another culture that complement their own," they drive the heterogeneous toward the homogeneous. I think the analogy of gaseous diffusion is a good one for my feelings on the subject. (In other words, I'm not trying to equate American culture with the Borg here!)
Frank, I think that the trend toward amalgamation is proven out all the more by "all the stuff that people value more than hamburgers." I offer the recent series of reconciliation moves between the Lutheran and Catholic churches as an example. Or how about the much-aligned Euro? (By the way, isn't it interesting how the Euro hovers so close to the value of the US dollar?)
I suppose this discussion would be made clearer if we could come up with a definition of culture. My dictionary offers: "The totality of socially transmitted behavior patterns, arts, beliefs, institutions, and all other products of human work and thought." But what does culture include? Off the top of my head:
Language
The Arts
Music
Drama/Theater
Graphic Arts
Literature
Etiquitte/Customs
Civil and Fiscal Government
Religion/Spirituality
Science/Technology
I think it's possible to measure roughly the degree to which each of these items has become more (or less) globally homogeneous over the last, say, 200 years. In my opinion, the trend is toward homogeneity. Now, I'm sure that there are other things that could be added to this list, but do they support the "sustainment of many static cultures" theory?
Thanks for helping me sort out my opinions on this!
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Dane
"Mathematicians have long held that a million monkeys banging on a million keyboards would eventually reproduce the collected wisdom of the human race. Now, thanks to the internet, we know this is not true." -- Robert Silensky
The Euro is actually steadily dropping below the value of the dollar.
Language - I wish I lived in Finland or something so I could bash the English language more. About the only country that could benefit from using English is France, and that's not going to happen any time soon (at least, not over the dead bodies over the French). In 50 years I'll bet English will decompose into something completely unusable. I'd personally much rather speak Esperanto or Hungarian or Quenya or anything else...
The Arts - I'll let someone else field this one.
Music - Video game sountracks are popular in Japan, but I think I'm the only one here who bought the Donkey Kong Country CD.
Drama/Theater - If movies count, I've heard that India generally produces hundreds and hundreds of films each year, whereas in the US movies are big-budget-type things.
Graphic Arts - Er...you mean, billboards and such? Or just paintings?
Literature - Since this depends on language, it's already very different. I challenge someone here to write anything without using the progressive tense, even though most non-English literature gets along fine without it.
Etiquette/Customs - Almost all countries differ in this regard.
Government - Ha! Everyone in the US complains when the government does anything, but that doesn't happen in many places.
Religion/Spirituality - As I mentioned, religion is a major component in the lives of many, and there's many different relgious views around.
Science/Technology - Look at all the research and development that goes into cars in the US, and then try to find a Ford Taurus in Europe. I can tell you that there aren't any in Italy.
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Frank's Home Page
"This spontaneous stuff takes a little bit of planning." - John Flansburgh
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"Nobody knows this, but I'm scared all the time... of what I might do, if I ever let go." -- Michael Garibaldi
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"Nobody knows this, but I'm scared all the time... of what I might do, if I ever let go." -- Michael Garibaldi
Well, most people can't afford an Aston-Martin. Does GM own any European car companies? (I think there's one called Opal or something like that.) Of course, then there's Diamler-Chrysler...let's talk about something besides cars in Europe.
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Frank's Home Page
"This spontaneous stuff takes a little bit of planning." - John Flansburgh
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"Lassie, her ears pricked up!"
--Atoth the Tamarian [From "Star Trek: Door Repair Guy"]
http://www.geocities.com/cyrano_jones.geo/
Language: If you'd like to quit speaking English, Frank, I think you'd find a large group of people who would be more than willing to fund the experiment. 
Music: The 20th century has been one long exercise in amalgamation musically. How else to explain clubs in Thailand playing trance music made in Germany inspired by Duke Ellington records?
Drama: Uh...you do realize that there are more than ten movies made in North America a year?
Science/Technology: This is probably the most global field listed on the, uh, list.
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"What did it mean to fly? A tremor in your soul. To resist the dull insistance of gravity."
--
Camper Van Beethoven
[Edit note: it turns out that this should have been shorter in the first place]
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Frank's Home Page
"This spontaneous stuff takes a little bit of planning." - John Flansburgh
[This message has been edited by The Shadow (edited March 17, 2000).]
The other thing I've always found hard to come to terms with is the style of cinema and music differ so greatly that if you ask the average Indian to watch a US made movie, they'll sit through it and have a pretty much one word reaction to it. "Crap". Similarily you'll find that an American will react the same way to Bollywood. The styles are just so different it ain't funny. Diversity isn't dead. It's just technologising.
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"Blind faith is the crutch of fools"
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"What did it mean to fly? A tremor in your soul. To resist the dull insistance of gravity."
--
Camper Van Beethoven
Most scientists aren't interested in patenting their ideas but rather sharing them.
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"If a nail is driven into the wrong place, it would be foolish indeed to become angry with the hammer." - Old Russian Proverb
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"Blind faith is the crutch of fools"
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"What did it mean to fly? A tremor in your soul. To resist the dull insistance of gravity."
--
Camper Van Beethoven
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"Blind faith is the crutch of fools"
With regards to the sermon, if he really did say that (I've found it hard to trust the western press these last few years with regards to Islamic matters), then I completely disagree with him. Making a speech like that merely leads to more hatred and mistrust. I have no problem with anyone trying to preserve their own culture, but to promote hatred is wrong. I say this as a Muslim and one of the poeple to whom this message was no doubt directed.
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Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious.
To this point, posters to this thread have offered some excellent evidence that the world is CURRENTLY a diverse place. I agree that it is. Only Frank has offered any evidence against the trend toward cultural homogeneity.
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Dane
"Mathematicians have long held that a million monkeys banging on a million keyboards would eventually reproduce the collected wisdom of the human race. Now, thanks to the internet, we know this is not true." -- Robert Silensky
I think he was confusing nationalism with diversity, though.
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"Nobody knows this, but I'm scared all the time... of what I might do, if I ever let go." -- Michael Garibaldi
What I see happening, from my admittedly untrained point of view, is a decline in the more superficial aspects of diversity, while the real meat of cultural exchange, the sharing of ideas, will be given a playing field the likes of which has never before been seen. This isn't really anything new, as humanity has always been moving towards more and more complex interactions. City-dwellers can think of and do things that nomads can't. Nation-states, empires...the course of human history can in some ways be viewed as an ever expanding network.
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"What did it mean to fly? A tremor in your soul. To resist the dull insistance of gravity."
--
Camper Van Beethoven
Sol, help me understand what you mean:
- What were the reasons behind the differences in cultures, and how are those reasons changing?
- Can you offer evidence that "a completely homogenic culture deprives itself of the ability to evolve?"
- Which aspects of diversity would you classify as "superficial?"
Please keep in mind that I am NOT advocating the amalgamation of all human cultures into a single Human Culture. I am merely postulating that such an amalgamation is underway and furthermore is inevitable, barring some massive technological reversion.
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Dane
"Mathematicians have long held that a million monkeys banging on a million keyboards would eventually reproduce the collected wisdom of the human race. Now, thanks to the internet, we know this is not true." -- Robert Silensky
As for the rest of it, I'm unclear on what you want me to explain. Technology tends on the whole to place emphasis on the inherint value of ideas as opposed to their origin. Hence, the old ways of dealing with such cultural differences must be altered as well. For example, Bob Steves can write a book and have it printed on that wacky Gutenburg's device, and I can be exposed to ideas without ever meeting him; an event that might have put a quick halt to my acceptance of his idea due to traditional prejudices. And by this I don't mean sexual or racial ones, specifically, but simply the fact that I am, in a pre-print era, very unlikely to be exposed to information from a great distance away, or from a group different enough from my own. Fast forward a few centuries, and Bob's decendant Steve Steves starts a webpage. The same concept applies, though multiplied by several degrees of simplicity.
In other words, I see a trend seperating the superficial notions we attach to ideas and the ideas themselves, and I cannot help but consider this a good thing.
Or let me give another example. I'm *grunt* and you're *double-grunt*. We have no language, and so our minds are seperated by a gulf that is nearly total. Later, my great times X grandchild and yours, Oog and Badug, meet each other hunting and share a few words over the desirability of local hunting grounds. Ideas are shared. But the scale is limited, because we have a very small radius in which to spread them. So history continues, and people start to gather in villages, and trade with other villages, and build cities, and then comes that next leap in idea technology: the road. Now our ideas can spread over a much larger area. However, since I am not likely to build a nice wide road between my front door and the Rampaging Horde, we've still got some major walls to scale. Extend this to the present day and you see the scope of our ability to share ideas has expanded from *grunt*'s...well, grunts, to Frank's very own web domain. And there is every indication that the trend will continue.
You could almost put it in terms of Hegel's theory of the Absolute, if you were a geekish philosophy student. However, I think we can spare each other that particular "joy".
To sum up, ideas can do more good (And to be fair, more bad, or at least on greater scales.) when the ideas flow as freely as possible.
But I fear I've gotten off track a bit.
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"What did it mean to fly? A tremor in your soul. To resist the dull insistance of gravity."
--
Camper Van Beethoven
Your ideas on the dissemenation of ideas are interesting, Sol, and I won't refute them. But can you offer proof of your first premise, namely that "a culture will die when perfectly homogenous because it cannot adapt to new situations?" What is there in homogeneity that precludes adaptability?
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Dane
"Mathematicians have long held that a million monkeys banging on a million keyboards would eventually reproduce the collected wisdom of the human race. Now, thanks to the internet, we know this is not true." -- Robert Silensky
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"What did it mean to fly? A tremor in your soul. To resist the dull insistance of gravity."
--
Camper Van Beethoven
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"Nobody knows this, but I'm scared all the time... of what I might do, if I ever let go." -- Michael Garibaldi
First, are you throwing Imperial Rome into the ring as being an example of cultural homogeneity? If so, are you serious?
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Dane
"Mathematicians have long held that a million monkeys banging on a million keyboards would eventually reproduce the collected wisdom of the human race. Now, thanks to the internet, we know this is not true." -- Robert Silensky
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"What did it mean to fly? A tremor in your soul. To resist the dull insistance of gravity."
--
Camper Van Beethoven
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Dane
"Mathematicians have long held that a million monkeys banging on a million keyboards would eventually reproduce the collected wisdom of the human race. Now, thanks to the internet, we know this is not true." -- Robert Silensky
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Frank's Home Page
"Bah! Screw Alaska!" - TSN
You aren't talking about an homogenous culture, however, but one where the differences aren't based on things that we might call petty, such as birth place or skin color.
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"What did it mean to fly? A tremor in your soul. To resist the dull insistance of gravity."
--
Camper Van Beethoven