I don’t have a fancy big brain moral or philosophical framework for arguing this thought, but is there any philosophical thinkers who speak on this?
For context I’m in the tech-world and I hear a lot of my peers with kids making sure their kids are always locked-in with their “Gifted kids programs” or “Advance learning” or whatever to make sure they are ready to be the “leaders of the future”. Which to me is not bad inherently, as I would expect any parent who gives a damn about their children to do everything in their power to give them everything they can for their future prosperity. I ain’t mad at them for that.
However, I also hear these same parents blaming the “culture” on why “kids/students/young people/XYZ group” are bad or why “[insert current boogeyman here] is way ahead of ‘us’”. Somewhat tangentially I think about how a lot of suffering that black people in America have suffered has been blamed on their “culture”, one that was born from marginalization and lack.
I don’t think it’s fair to say a “culture problem” exists in black America without really examining the structural problems that exists as well. Is that because some people “make it”? Both in the black example or the student example, do people blame “culture” when there are some instances of people that do well their their personal overcoming of bad conditions?
In both of these cases I think that it’s really easy to blame “The Culture™©®” rather than look at why things are as they are. I do believe in personal autonomy and choice and stuff, but I feel like this transcends this. When an issues something that’s faced by the majority of people in an instance, I feel like it’s no longer an issue of personal choices. The general curve of outcomes for most people are getting worse, and I don’t think that is a fair argument to say it’s a “personal choice” problem
Sorry for the rambling, I’m not very concise in my writing these days. So I guess my question is “are there leftie philosophical thinkers who have commented on “culture” as a buffer to avoid crtique of the powerful?”
My spouse is a nurse who works in a diverse workplace consisting of basically four groups of people:
- Asian women
- Jamaican women
- white women
- hogs
She told me once about an extremely awkward interaction when they had a Jamaican patient who was just really dirty. No need to go into details, but this was an exceptionally dirty person with terrible hygiene. One of the white woman nurses asked one of the Jamaican nurses if it was part of their “culture” to just be really dirty. And the Jamaican nurse was just like…what? The white woman had also asked the question like she was just genuinely curious if Jamaicans were naturally dirty, like she was being nice to the Jamaican nurse by taking an interest in her “culture.”
I just look at the word “culture” as a way for liberals to talk about race without using the word “race.”
My wife’s manager is also a hog who has gotten in trouble multiple times for telling racist jokes. I overheard him on a zoom meeting, and he basically sounds like that clip of Alex Jones begging the coach to let him back into the game. This guy is now in charge of making sure that the nurses don’t say anything inappropriate in the hospital.
It’s just another example of how the average westoid thinks idealistically rather than materially
It’s just “cultural bolshivism” repackaged for the modern era. As always it’s fascist nonsense. And fascist nonsense is always there to protect the elite from criticism.
Study by Fausey and Boroditsky: blame agentives
Abstract
When bad things happen, how do we decide who is to blame and how much they should be punished? In the present studies, we examined whether subtly different linguistic descriptions of accidents influence how much people blame and punish those involved. In three studies, participants judged how much people involved in particular accidents should be blamed and how much they should have to pay for the resulting damage. The language used to describe the accidents differed subtly across conditions: Either agentive (transitive) or non-agentive (intransitive) verb forms were used. Agentive descriptions led participants to attrxibute more blame and request higher financial penalties than did nonagentive descriptions. Further, linguistic framing influenced judgments, even when participants reasoned about a well-known event, such as the “wardrobe malfunction” of Super Bowl 2004. Importantly, this effect of language held, even when people were able to see a video of the event. These results demonstrate that even when people have rich established knowledge and visual information about events, linguistic framing can shape event construal, with important real-world consequences. Subtle differences in linguistic descriptions can change how people construe what happened, attribute blame, and dole out punishment. Supplemental results and analyses may be downloaded from http://pbr.psychonomic-journals.org/content/supplemental.
This was studied in 2010 and published by University of California San Diego. There’s actual consequences from the language we use and how it results in blaming others. English speakers assign blame to people for things that happened on their own. For example, maybe a storm breaks a tree branch. English speakers will say “Someone broke the tree branch,” as opposed to “The branch fell into the road.” This creates conflicts as people will blame others naturally through the words they choose, instead of using passive statements.
Marxists frequently encounter this with liberals. Marxists will want to state something plainly because of material analysis. Liberals will want to assign blame/credit to people, causing them to believe in Great Men of History, rejecting systemic and material causes. A Marxist might say “The price of eggs has risen due to decreased supply and inflation.” The liberal will retort “Trump is already worsening the economy, so eggs have gone up in price.” They ignore the problem was also happening under Biden.
yeah people definitely use “culture” as a stand in for a lot of different things, whether it’s structural factors with material causes, race, whatever
Yea this is exactly it. If structural critique is verboten, then culture is the only way to explain social forces.
Pretty sure this is all already perfectly there in the Marxist idea of the base and superstructure. If whatever explanation one presents considers only one of these sphere’s it is bound to be wrong, willfully or not.
hmmm… not enough of a theory hog to know of any sources of thinkers making this point but I’d imagine that anybody critiquing “social contagion” arguments/theory should be touching on this in spirit.
