Cultural appropriation

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Cultural appropriation
/ˈkʌlʧᵊrᵊl əˌprəʊprɪˈeɪʃᵊn/ (n.)
The inappropriate, problematic or unacknowledged adoption of elements of one culture by members of another. Some see it, we are told as an exploitative form of “cultural colonialism”.

In the neuroticist’s un-ending quest to find things about to be upset about on behalf of others, the wilder-eyed of our number have taken up intellectual property, a cultural concept squarely rooted in the western intellectual tradition — yes, that western intellectual tradition: the one that colonised the planet and ruined the natural world — egregiously misunderstood it, and then to misapplied it to cultural and linguistic situations in a way that makes sense at all to anyone but — well, a libtard.

But “cultural appropriation” itself is a brazen act of cultural appropriation, from the very western oppressors against whom the charge is usually levelled. Even more ironic is it that this, of all western intellectual traditions, is the one to which critical theorists should hitch their wagons, since it was the very idea of “property rights” by which western colonialists subjugated their foreign dominions in the first place.

The idea that cultural practices are the sorts of things that can be stolen is itself an artefact of colonial exploitation.

Segregating certain historical behaviours and then reserving them for sections of the community is so profoundly illiberal, profligate (why waste good ideas?) and wounding to the cause of cultural education, progress, integration, and for that matter preservation.

There is no monopoly on good ideas. Well, there wasn’t, until some capitalists invented a way of asserting monopoly rights over good ideas and — ironically — forgot to patent it.

It’s all about the memes, stupid

Now even if you are minded to hoover up all the righteous, post-colonial angst — it seems to be the vogue right now — this preposterous idea is still a duffer, for it presumes that members of a culture own, or have some kind of moral right to control, their culture. This is to get things precisely backwards: we do not own our culture; our culture owns us. It will decide where it spreads. We are but vessels.

In the same way one can say it was not humans who domesticated wheat but vice versa, we should regard useful cultural artefacts as units of memetic transmission, replicating themselves wherever they can find a suitable host. We are those hosts. (It is a pity the internet, er, appropriated Richard Dawkins’ coinage the “meme”, for it captures this idea perfectly.)

The most resilient cultures are those whose memes replicate most freely, spreading their ideas into the brains of “aliens”, often displacing the cultural memes that were already there. That was pretty much what the colonials did. You know; colonising those brains with western ideas, like blankets, guns, governorship, property rights, denim, highway cops and cheeseburgers.

The real concern for a culture ought not to be when disrespectful aliens are borrowing its ideas, but in the opposite case: when its own members are becoming infected with new alien ideas, displacing those of its own. That a culture should have any interest in controlling intellectual property — thereby artificially restraining the free movement of its ideas — is the perverse western idea.

See also

• Libtard
• Evolution by natural selection