Against the ‘ethnic food festival’ conception of culture

The roots of this idea in social status positioning and in Scott Alexander's idea of universal culture

A particular view of ‘culture’ has become embedded in the collective midwit mind in recent years. I think of this as the ‘ethnic food festival’ understanding: culture as an exotic experience that you consume, normally deriving from some non-Western, or at least non-Anglo source. In this conception the only culture that Britain does possess is stolen from abroad, because abroad is where ethnic food festivals come from.

Examples of people expressing this sentiment frequently make their way round twitter, with some particularly impressive recent ones reproduced below. The last one came from the founder of a campaign group called Save British Farming - British beef seemingly lacks culture when roasted and served with Yorkshire pudding, but gains it when minced into bolognese.

Some recent vox pops on the question of whether Britain has culture

Perfectly distilled #FBPE

The ethnic food festival conception of culture is so inane that it’s hardly even worth refuting, but Niall Gooch made the effort earlier this year with a defence of the existence of British culture. As you will be surprised to learn, Britain has a prominent history and present of cultural production, in art, literature, music, television, film etc, and furthermore this culture has been and is far more globally influential than that of most countries which you might find represented at an ethnic food festival.

Of course the ethnic food festival conception is not about reality for its adherents but about political and social positioning within a cultural framework of ‘old white Britain = bad, new diverse Britain = good’. However there is more to it than just this; its roots can be found in what is thought of, consciously or not, as universal culture.

The idea of universal culture

In ‘How The West Was Won’ Scott Alexander puts forward his concept of ‘universal culture’, i.e. the culture that people in industrialised societies inhabit. In this view, Western culture, conceived of as involving things like dancing around maypoles and copying Latin manuscripts, is dead, devoured by the universal culture it spawned, which is now in the process of devouring all non-Western cultures too. Universal culture in this conception is simply ‘culture that works’ in the novel conditions of industrial society, for example coca-cola and sushi taste better than what people consumed before, and egalitarian gender norms are more popular and likeable than their predecessors.

Universal culture thus has no more relation to pre-industrial Western culture than modern medicine (‘medicine that works’) has to traditional European medicine (like Hippocrates’s four humours). It is only Western in the most superficial of ways, and it would be substantively the same if it had been created by another civilization that had industrialised before the West.

Alexander offers two reasons behind this, firstly that the common conditions of industrial society mean that ‘the best way to industrialise is the best way to industrialise’ and secondly that modern communications technology means that no culture now develops in isolation, and thus the cultural forms that are found to work best in industrial society can quickly spread around the world and rapidly outcompete those that don’t. The result is the inexorable spread of the universal culture from its centres in the great global capitals out into the ‘provinces’ of the rest of the world.

Who thinks they live in a universal culture?

I think that Scott Alexander’s view is overly materialistic and that only someone completely immersed in Western culture could really think that they live in a universal culture. But this idea is certainly real in people’s minds. At least Alexander recognises that it is a culture: many others so completely mentally inhabit what is thought to be universal culture that they do not see it as culture at all: the fish cannot see the water as they say. For them genuine culture by definition therefore must be outside the universal culture, and thus culture must mean ethnic food festivals.

The idea of the universal culture is tied sociopolitically to liberal individualism and progressive politics: these rose to dominance in the world made by the industrial revolution after all. The Western traditionalists who maintain a Christian or historically rooted national identity only partially inhabit the universal culture, as they are also attached to the cultural forms that the it is devouring. Rationalist libertarians like Scott Alexander certainly inhabit it, but they are not its main and truest representatives as they inhabit it self consciously (and are insignificant numerically).

The most relevant mass demographic of the universal culture is the bog standard Western liberal/leftist, who inhabits it unselfconsciously. In the ‘Britain has no culture of its own’ clips I linked to in the first paragraph we can see the expression of this worldview: a curious combination of solipsism and self loathing, meaning self-abnegation when it comes to positives, and a desperate arrogation of the sins of other cultures when it comes to negatives. It is a worldview that considers Britain to have produced nothing of cultural value itself, but maintains that the British empire is responsible for the persistence of anti-gay laws around the world. It doesn’t question why Kenya, for example, was able to throw off the yoke of British cultural imperialism when it legalised polygamy in 2014, but was strangely not able to do the same regarding its anti-sodomy laws.

Universal culture does have something to do with Western culture

Beyond my criticisms of the assumptions of those who think they inhabit a universal culture, I think the very idea that the universal culture has nothing substantive to do with Western culture is wrong. Scott Alexander thinks that the universal culture is just what works under industrial society. But while industrial societies undoubtedly share more cultural similarities than premodern agricultural ones did, they by no means simply converge on the same idea of ‘what works’ any more than their agricultural predecessors did.

Many countries have been industrialised for well over a hundred years and yet strong cultural differences persist between them. Sweden, Italy and Japan, for example, all industrialised in roughly the same period (from the late 19th century), and have been living in the condition of industrial society for over a century. Yet they differ markedly in attitudes to individualism vs collectivism, attitudes to work, gender roles etc.

Scott Alexander offered egalitarian gender norms as a product of industrial society ‘that works’, yet it is not obvious that the West became much more gender egalitarian over the first century of its industrialisation. In fact in some ways it became less so, with middle class women moving out of the workforce and thus becoming more economically dependent on their husbands, many of whom also gained new political rights in this period that were denied to women. Gender and marriage norms were different in Europe compared to Asia going back long before industrialisation, for example regarding polygamy, arranged marriage, age at marriage, cousin marriage, female seclusion, and practices like foot binding, FGM and face covering.

Universal culture is to a large extent Western culture with roots going back long before industrialisation. The rest of the world has to some extent converged on the West, for example the average age at first marriage was in the mid 20s for both men and women in England hundreds of years ago, while in India in 1992-3 two thirds of women married before age 18, but by 2019-21 this had dropped to a quarter.

There’s an argument that the West’s culture was relevant to it industrialising first because its culture of relatively weak family ties was well suited to producing large non-family based economic and political structures like the corporation and the modern state. But this is not the same thing as saying that this culture was caused by industrialisation, nor that it is the inevitable model that all industrialised societies will converge on.

Is universal culture universal because it works or because it’s prestigious?

The ‘universal culture is culture that works’ idea assumes that people adopt things purely because they satisfy some need better than the alternatives. But in many cases this is not the reason at all, things can become culturally dominant because they are associated with rich and powerful groups and in spite of their impracticality.

A good example of this is the almost total global monopoly on ‘prestige male dress’ of the Western business suit, which in no way ‘works’ for the climatic conditions of most of the planet. What works are things like traditional Chinese silk robes or the Arab thawb. The business suit can be made to work anywhere via air conditioning, but inherently it’s an inferior garment for warm climates. If China had industrialised before the West, Europeans would probably be shivering in silk robes and cranking up the heating to compensate.

The importance of a fuller understanding of culture

So I disagree with the inherent universality of what is thought to be the universal culture. It is more Western than is claimed by Scott Alexander, and its current dominance is also about power and prestige in addition to ‘what works’. And contra the 'culture as ethnic food festival’ enthusiasts, it is of course, a real culture of its own. I would like to see these sorts of people acquire a more complete understanding of what their own culture really is. This would enable them to recognise that it is something precious and also something that is vulnerable and worth defending. The ‘universal culture’ will not necessarily conquer all before it for ever. The fish cannot see the water, but by their lack of care they are polluting it.