On Culture, Tradition, National Identity and Individuality.

On my previous post I touched briefly on culture, specifically on the fact that I am against the preservation of cultures. I thought I'd expand on that. My thoughts are quite controversial but I think I can make sound and reasonable arguments for them.

I was born in England and yet I have lived in a number of different countries. I'm really quite tired of being labelled as English as a primary descriptor of my identity. It is not. Yesterday I paid another visit to my dentist and he tried to make conversation with me about one of his daughters and the fact that she is a supporter of an English football team (that's a soccer team to American readers) known as the Bolton Wonderers. I told him that I have absolutely no interest in football and that I never have had.

He was surprised; "But you're English?", he asked, as though my distaste of football called into question the knowledge he already had of my place of birth. So I explained to him that, to me, football is 22 men chasing a bit of dead cow up and down a field trying to get it to go into one of two fishing nets. It simply doesn't interest me.

"That's very strange", he said, "All English love football".

"Obviously not", I answered. And this is the point I want to try and communicate here regarding culture, tradition, national identity, and individuality.

It is a gross and erroneous assumption to conclude that the geography of someone's birth determines their preferences or any aspect of their individuality, especially in an age when you can visit any English city and buy newspapers in 10 different languages (at least), food from 6 different continents, meet people from more than 100 countries and, by simply jumping onto the nearest internet connection, access thoughts and cultural practices from any culture currently on Earth and a large number of those already expired. Determining your own or anybody else's preferences by the accident of the geography of birth is a certain contradiction of the freedom of the individual mind to learn and choose.

To preserve a culture, in an active sense as opposed to in information archives, requires people to practice it. And it is interesting that this preservation, by actively practicing a culture, also seems to be a responsibility that falls upon those that have been born into it. How exactly would it be viewed if I, as a so called Englishman, moved to Africa to become Zulu and maintain the Zulu way?

I'll accept that cultures are less and less preserved simply by geography and in fact are transmitted now from parent to child as opposed to location to new occupant, but isn't this really the same thing? Through an accident of birth a child is expected to adopt an identity, an identity which often prohibits the adoption of behaviours or preferences that the child may otherwise enjoy. Few atheists have a problem in recognising that a Muslim or Christian parent has no valid grounds upon which to force Islam or Christianity upon their child as an inherited identity. We recognise that a view of the universe and its functioning is far too complex a thing to assume a young child has any understanding of the alternatives and so we recognise their right to learn before choosing. What is the difference with a culture? Aren't all the distinct preferences that constitute a human life equally complex and require at least as long to determine for oneself? Because I was born in England must I like football? Apparently so, if we are to accept common belief.

Must I also be cold and aloof, a hooligan, reserved, a great complainer in restaurants, and so on? Of course not. Neither should an Austrian child grow up with a love of lederhosen and sausages as opposed to saris and aloo ghobbi. The same is true of every aspect of "culture". If we are free then we are free to select that which we prefer from everything on offer. The individual aspects of any culture, from food to music and poetry belong no more to those that were born, by accident, with some tenuous thread of heritage to some often forgotten origin of that aspect than they do to any other that has had the fortune to experience it. Culture is nonsense. Cultural heritage is universal. A culture is nothing more than the practices that define it and the practices are each individually separable and free for all to choose.

But let's stick with this idea of preserving a culture for a while since it is such a bizarre but widely accepted ideal. How are we defining the culture that should be preserved and on what grounds? Why don't we preserve caveman culture and force children to grow up respecting and practicing the ancient rites of long dead hunter gatherers? I'm sure there'd be many complaints if some group tried. Why don't we pack kids onto Viking long boats and send them off to rape and pillage the coastal towns of neighbouring countries? At what point is something a culture and at what point do we recognise that the behaviour is something that is really better left behind or simply a personal choice? When does a culture start and end? Of course, a culture never really does start, it evolves, and it ends only when everybody following that collection of evolving memes has died. Cultures are dynamic. If we are going to preserve them then at what time in their evolution are we going to stick a pin in the passage of time and say "that's Zulu" or "that's English"? Are Zulu software architects Zulu?

And for that matter, why not preserve the cultures that form from the mix and abandonment of other cultures? Will we preserve McDonalds when the time finally comes? Do we really have to listen to 80's music and dance the robot dance for the rest of all time? For that matter, why not preserve the Nazi culture, which was by any measure an impressive time, full of ritual and imagery, in German history? It's all thoroughly ridiculous and upon analysis contrary to personal liberty and evolving standards and the increasing diversity of options. I'd even go as far as to call it racism.

"176 die in Taiwan plane crash, including 3 Britons" – we've all seen and heard headlines like that. Are the lives of those 3 Britons supposed to mean more to me because of an accident of birth, which in reality means I have no more knowledge of them and no greater connection to them than I do with the 103 Taiwanese passengers that died in the same crash? "British sailors captured", on what grounds should I care more about the injustice done to them than I should about the same injustice done to anybody else?

Don't get me wrong, I am not stating that I shouldn't care, I'm simply asking on what grounds does a tragedy or an injustice become more tragic or more unjust simply because I happen to carry the same passport as someone involved or happen to have been born within the same arbitrary boundaries of a nation that came into its virtual existence in the minds and documents of men a million years after my real relationship to these other men formed? Do you think we might be nicer to each other if we asked that question?

I have had great trouble for my attitude to national identity, culture and tradition during my life. Despite this it has remained largely unchanged. It's one of the opinions I seem to have formed very early in life, like atheism, and I've never found a valid argument to change. In England there is an annual remembrance day of those fallen in war and as a child I was supposed to go and stand, often in the rain, for an extended period of sincere boredom whilst music I wouldn't choose to listen to was played and wreathes were laid. It usually went something like this:

"Why do I have to come to this?" I asked.

"Because it's tradition", I was told.

"It's not my tradition. Can I go?"

"You ungrateful little bastard. These men died for you and you can't even spare an hour for them!"

"They didn't die for me. Not one of them had any suspicion I would be born."

"You wouldn't be here without them, your country men, who gave their lives for you!"

"I wouldn't be here without Hitler either, or a dinosaur that decided to walk one way around a tree instead of another. Should I stand in the rain to thank them also?"

"You evil little bastard …." And so on. I'm sure you get the idea.

But my point was never to belittle the suffering of others or their loss of life or even the certain heroics that are indeed attributable to many of my "country men" who died in the various wars, without whom I certainly would never have been. But I wouldn't have been if it were not for the brave Japanese, or even the cowards. I wouldn't have been without the gallant tin of asparagus soup that upped the zinc level in my grandfather's testicles for him to produce the precise batch of sperm from within which came the one that gave rise to my father. If we are going to base our honours on unwitting responsibility in the vast chain of consequences that gave rise to my life then we'd better honour absolutely everything. If instead we are going to honour based on bravery then why only honour the Allied dead? Is it not reasonable to inquire whether an equal proportion of our enemies were equally brave?

My point is I do respect that a great many people died in some very awful wars. I do respect that they made a sacrifice and I even respect that many of them made it with courage. But if I want to respect that then I think I'm far better off opening a book and looking not at some flowers around a monument legitimising their sacrifice but at the corpses piled high on all sides, showing me how truly illegitimate the artificial separators that allow us to commit such madness are. But, by the accident of birth, I am supposed to care that these are dead heroes and those are dead enemies. That may well be true but there is nothing to tell the two piles of corpses apart once the uniforms are removed and they were likely equal in courage and in pretty much every way, except by the forces of national identity and inherited cultural identity that allowed them the prejudice to call themselves different enough to warrant putting bullets through each others brains.

I am no pacifist and I think there are times to kill and I even agree with the heroes of the country in which I was born that they lived in such a time. But I wonder what really separates people when they stop taking pride in the accident of their birth and the behavioural quirks dictated by the "culture" they inherited before mutating it into another separatist cause? We are headed for more of these times so long as we determine that our "who" equates to the "where" of our births or the silly little rituals we were born to observe. And between those times of conflict we are destined only to shore up the crumbling walls of ridiculous traditions that we determine we own when it is clear we are really allowing them to own us. And we are all too ready to gift our children into the arms of restrictions and obligations that are anti-choice, anti-individuality, anti-freedom, and most importantly, when you get right down to it, at least partially anti-everybody else.

So, in my last post I made a statement that the charity that preserves cultures will be recognised as immoral because by preserving cultures you are actually preserving the right of parents or a group to enforce that their children remain within that group or somehow carry a burden of preserving ways that will conflict with individual freedom. You can preserve the pygmies for a billion years but to do so you have to preserve around 50 million generations of their children in a state of ignorance and isolate them from the benefits and options provided by the rest of the world. No parent has the right to insist upon that for their child. The preservation of a culture, an entirely non-existent thing, is a goal that ignores the dynamic and the freedom of an ever changing reality of knowledge and choice. Put them in the history books, video the practices and record the songs, and let them die. Cultures and traditions are interesting but they should own nobody. Jointly we own the knowledge of what has come before and we can choose from it anything we find improves our lives, pleases our taste buds or makes us dance. You don't have to be born into it to like it and you don't have to carry it just because your parents did.

Cultures are a burden, their individual practices may be so wonderful that every individual has the right to enjoy – but nobody has the obligation to carry it on and nobody has the right to oblige others to do so.

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Welcome All Aryans (and white people also).

I’ve just looked at my stats out of vague curiosity and seen that a couple of recent visitors have been referred from this URL: http://www.panaryan.com/forum/showthread.php?p=6137

The string "Aryan" sort of leapt out at me so I decided to take a look and I saw that I’ve been linked to from within this forum. The particular linked post is a video clip musical attack against Islam titled Musical Interlude of no particular importance. Taking a quick look at this forum reveals the following welcoming message from the folks over at the Pan Aryan Alliance:

"Friends & Allies Friends and allies of the white race, nationalists of the other races who wish to work together to pursue common interests and to fight against the common enemies. Please read the FAQ for important information."

Now, I’ve been likened lots of times to a white supremacist when I criticise Islam (despite the fact that I have never revealed my own ethnicity). I’ve been accused of being racist for attacking Islam more times than I can remember (despite the fact that Islam is an ideology and not a race). So now that I am being linked to from a forum on a White Supremacist site I’d like to state something again that I have stated many times before. Race has absolutely nothing to do with my opinion about Islam.

I am not a racist.

It has been my experience that there are very many essentially decent people with very many essentially stupid ideas that fail to conform to reality. So, although it may seem unusual for me not to leap into a tirade of abuse against visitors from the Pan Aryan Alliance, I’m not going to. Can I say "being a racist doesn’t make somebody a bad person" and get away with it? I doubt it, but I’m saying it anyway. Being a racist is a bad personality trait and racism is certainly a belief that does not gel with our scientific understanding of the human body, brain and mind. Racism is also undoubtedly one of those unclean catch all phrases polluted by myriad factors other than that for which it claims to be the central guide (race). For example, am I racist if I don’t trust people as much when I’m in South Africa as I do when I’m in Japan? Well, I’d say not. There are learned cultural influencers acting upon a persons behaviour at all times. I am more likely to be a victim of violent crime in Johannesburg than I am in Tokyo as the cultures in the two cities are different with regards to that particular behaviour. Do I attribute that to differences in skin colour?

Of course I do not.

I attribute it to different social conditions due to different social attitudes, which are dynamic, highly dependent upon a very large number of other dynamic factors and no more permanent than the morning dew. I think a lot of people are racist because they forget how barbaric their own ancestors were. I think a lot of people are racist because they don’t fully understand what a thin sliver of infrastructure enhancing recent history separates them from the non-physical attributes that they attribute to others based purely on appearance.

So instead of attacking and insulting I’d like to invite visitors from the Pan Aryan Alliance (PAA) and everybody else to discuss your views here and justify them. I’ll attempt to do the same with my view that race is a term that the vast majority of scientific opinion agrees has little or no taxonomic value or significance, in that race is determined by a selective set of visually obvious physical (and to some degree cultural) markers that have no correlation to any observed psychological attributes. In other words, the colour of someone’s skin has absolutely fuck all to do with the functioning of their mind – people are people.

I’d like to start it off by attacking a precept required to be racist – a strong ethnic identity. It is impossible for one to be racist against others unless one first defines their own race. Now, the people over at PAA have obviously already done so by defining themselves as Aryan. So what does Aryan actually mean? Let’s take a look.

It turns out that Aryan is actually a word describing the ancient Indo-Iranian and Indo-European peoples who lived in what are now Iran, Afghanistan and India. In fact, one of the things that surprised me when I lived in India and started learning Hindi was that there are words that are virtually identical in Spanish and Hindi (coming from Sanskrit, a pure Aryan language) despite the fact that these are not modern words. In fact, the vast array of languages in India’s past and present are distinguished as being Aryan (e.g. Hindi) or non-Aryan (Dravidian and Kol influenced languages eg. Munda) because the Aryan languages share origins with Zend, Persian, Greek Latin, Celtic, Teutonic and Slavonic whilst so called non-Aryan languages do not. In Sanskrit the word Aryan actually means spiritual and has no physical or materialistic connotations or meanings whatsoever. European Aryan languages have been criticised as being not truly Aryan due to the materialistic focus of the languages being incompatible with the spiritual focus of Sanskrit. I tend not to agree with that, but it is interesting to note the degree to which the debate is taken when considering Aryan languages to distance the classification from having any suggestion of physicality. It certianly has never meant "white", that much at least is certain.

It shouldn’t surprise modern misusers of the word Aryan that it actually has its roots in India and the history of the Vedas. After all, the most famous Aryan symbol of all time shares an ancient Indian history. I am speaking of course of the Swastika.

The Swastika continues to be a very common sight in India today that has absolutely nothing at all to do with National Socialism. The symbol itself is the oldest known symbol, predating the Ankh. It has been recorded throughout history in many cultures including in China, Japan, India, Southern Europe and even by Native American cultures. This should not surprise anybody that is familiar with the strong law of small numbers.

"There aren't enough small numbers to meet the many demands made of them." - Gardner 1980, Guy 1988ab, Guy 1990 - The first strong law of small numbers.

I’ll explain.

Have you ever sat down to design a symbol and found that all the good ones are already taken? If not, try it now.

A good symbol will generally be simple, involving a small number of lines or simple shapes. These sorts of symbols are easier for us to remember and recognise. After all, our brains are designed to work with small numbers also. However, if all you work with is small numbers then the number of options you can come up with becomes limited. If you look at the car grille badges of the cars you pass each day you’ll see what I mean very quickly.

When we are dealing with small numbers there are smaller numbers of useful options and so it should be no surprise that the Swastika should have emerged independently in many different cultures. The only problem with this however, with the exception of the Native Americans, is that it did not emerge independently. Despite having become known by many different names in different parts of the world the Swastika has its origins in India, where it is known in the Sanskrit as "svastika" which literally means "to be good" and it is a common religious symbol of life and good luck, also commonly used by Buddhists. One source of amusement for western tourists in India is the number of items offered for sale to them (from handbags and t-shirts to ashtrays) brightly emblazoned with a large and cheerful swastika central to a pleasant and frequently busy patterned design. The symbol has more than 3,000 years of tradition in India and the Nazis didn’t succeed in disassociating a much loved symbol from its historically positive meaning.

So, the so-called Aryans, just like the symbol they made infamous across much of the World by association with racially motivated mass murder took both the word they use to describe their ethnicity and the symbol they march behind from, that’s right, dark skinned, brown eyed, Indians.

It should therefore follow that the Pan Aryan Alliance, if we take its name as any indicator, should be a thriving social club with an agenda of promoting European, Iranian and Indian superiority slightly preferencing darker skinned, darker eyed members for being more "Aryan" than their pale skinned, blonde haired, blue eyed colleagues.

What I’m getting at here is that of course the very idea of ethnicity is total HORSE SHIT. Our differences are largely due to geographical isolation having lead to cultural differentiation on time scales that are much too short for evolution to have had chance to cause speciation. For that matter, evolution has also failed to result in any known significant physiological difference that has any relationship to intelligence or any social aspect of our behaviour. In other words – we are all equal.

If you want to believe that you are an African American because your ancestors came more recently from African than did those of the Japanese American next to you then fine – go right ahead. But if you also think that gives you some sort of special connection to Africa or some tiny temporal slice of an ever changing and dynamic culture that means you should feel different to the Japanese American next to you then quite frankly you are deluding yourself away from reality. And in my mind you are just as guilty of unfounded racism as the Pan Aryan Alliance that think you are some sort of half-animal, subhuman scum because you happen to have an all year tan or a different texture to your hair. It’s ridiculous and means about as much to me as stating that if someone is English that means they must like to watch football and drink tea.

Most racist people are racist against perceived traits. Sometimes those perceived traits are learned as part of culture. Sometimes those perceived traits are due to differences in infrastructure and education. Most of the time however, those perceived traits don’t even exist – they are the ghosts of ignorant hatred and ignorant pride. And even those traits which are real, such as skin colour and some other minor characteristics of appearance have absolutely no connection to how our brains are wired and that is why race is widely considered to have absolutely no taxonomic value whatsoever.

Being racist is against the evidence. Being racist, white and calling yourself an Aryan is just stupid and it should be a wake up call for you to consider checking up on some facts. Maybe, if you question, you'll find your opinions begin to change. Good luck.

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