The Art of Culture War - Jordan Hall

tags:: #source/article Philosophy on/society
author:: Jordan Hall
Source

A culture is self-reproducing because the people who act according to the characteristics of the culture tend to enculturate the people around them to the culture. (View Highlight)

Importantly, pretty much everything that you do becomes an “enculturating” artifact precisely because it carries with it and produces the effect of the cultural scheme that impressed itself on you. (View Highlight)

Culture proceeds by war. On the one hand, all war is (deep down) culture war and, on the other, all cultures are always at war. (View Highlight)

In the case of cultures, the ultimate scarce resources are attention and expression — which is to say that cultures compete for the degree to which they direct the actions of people. And they do so continuously, completely and comprehensively. (View Highlight)

What matters is that the whole environment is at play, all the time. The war is never fair. And whatever survives — survives. (View Highlight)

Culture war is total — and whatever can win will spread and increase its hold on total resources. (View Highlight)

“war is culture war by specific means” (View Highlight)

Going deeper, if we fully understand the degree to which culture is always at war, we understand that any given culture is always at war with itself. Every culture is itself a fitness landscape — composed of many, many different micro cultures always struggling amongst themselves for supremacy and entering into complex alliances. As a result, it can be a struggle with surprise reversals and unexpected twists. (View Highlight)

Consequently — change the technology and you will naturally expect to see sometimes extensive changes in the elements of the culture. For example, the phrase, “The Medium is the Message” is true. A centralized, broadcast medium (e.g., television) will tend to promote certain kinds of cultural elements and inhibit others; by contrast, a decentralized medium (e.g., the Internet) will tend to present a quite different fitness landscape. (View Highlight)