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Cultural Hegemony, Cultural Self-denigration, and What We Should do About it
During the second half of the last century there was a significant amount of attention directed toward what came to be known as the "Third World". Overt colonialism went by the wayside, and the newly independent countries were to begin the process of "development". The Cold War had a tremendous effect on this process as both the United States and the Soviet Union sought out these countries to garner support. In the U.S., development theory became the dominant strand of thought in international relations with regard to the Third World. The idea was that these countries were to develop in much the same way that the successful giants in the First World had done, that is, through various stages of economic development and that aid was to be given accordingly. The problem was that those successful giants in the West had developed in a different era, in which, they were already at the top and moving into "unknown territory" of economic growth. The Third World was at the bottom, and the "territory" of economic growth that was unknown to the giants was very well-known throughout the world. The invisible hand could now be seen, and the troubling thing was that it was seen clutching onto the Third World, manipulating it to and fro, for the benefit of the giants. Instead of developing, the Third World became subject to a new and more subtle form of colonialism, one that was driven by the market itself as the giant's companies began to spread all over the globe. So the people of the Third World continued to starve, but now they also were able to watch the rich, as the latter came in with different values, customs, laws, and motivations.
This century requires a re-thinking of First World-Third World relations. I hope to intimate toward that direction here, and even though I certainly am indebted to liberal theory to some extent (in particular Thomas Pogge), I believe we need to go beyond that way of thinking to a significant degree because it has been largely ineffectual as far as actually bringing about change in the world (the wealthy keep getting wealthier and poor keep getting poorer), and because of its universalist language which seems to imperialize values onto other people.
Two quotes that provide some direction for the two-pronged purpose of this essay are necessary here. First, Thomas Pogge writes that "one great challenge to any morally sensitive person today is the extent and severity of global poverty". Second, Donald J. Puchala argues that the West has maintained cultural hegemony after the end of colonialism by its "control of the world's media, the prevalence of Western languages and the Western near-monopoly over advanced academic training and the determination of disciplinary canons". I would like to focus on the problem of drastic poverty on the one hand, and the problem of cultural hegemony and the reactions of self-denigration or hatred towards the West in the Third World, on the other. In both cases I believe it is important to think about what life would be like if one were in the other's shoes here. Even though being lucky enough to be born in the land of milk and honey may make it difficult for one to engage in empathetic understanding of the starving other and the self-denigrating other, such understanding is vitally necessary in these times where the old ways of depersonalizing and decontextualizing theories have failed to bring about needed change.
There simply is an urgent need to feed people now and to provide people with the means to subsist so that they can at least have some sort of livelihood now. This claim may be held under the banner "human flourishing" which Pogge suggests, but it is important to note that human flourishing is a broad term with few specific qualifications for what an ideal flourishing would be. Rather than spelling out a list of rights or capabilities, this idea of flourishing is open and subject to historical context. That said, the notion of human flourishing seems to entail some sort of ability to have and maintain a culture; to facilitate some sort of cultural value that one can participate in shaping if one chooses to do so. While it is clearly necessary for individuals to be able to have access to subsistence needs so that they do have to spend all their time worrying about where they might be able to find food for the day, something more is necessary if we claim to promote cultural flourishing. What is needed is a genuine understanding of otherness and a more cosmopolitan view of culture on our part so that different cultures may be allowed to flourish in a self-determining manner.
There are three assumptions that I hold here, and that I will proceed to discuss throughout this essay. The first is that human suffering is bad and something should be done about it. The second is that difference is good, and that one should not seek out the other only to make the other same. The third is that values are created in context, conceptions of what is right or wrong are created, and while this may seem to collapse all morality into relativism, it in fact does not. Rather, it simply makes the job of determining what is right more difficult because moral laws are not handed down.
Formal, top-down theories about what values one ought to uphold and what actions ought to be down to overcome inequality do not take into account contextual circumstances and subtle cultural variations. Such theories can actually hinder such flourishing by giving a set of ideals to live up to instead of letting individuals participate in the creation of values and institutions of their own choosing. Also, if such theories implicitly or explicitly call for a type of step-by-step process as if one were simply climbing a ladder, then they ignore the possibility that those individuals have become increasingly empowered to choose for themselves what they want to do and what values they want to pursue. This is what is appealing to Pogge's call for the Global Resources Dividend as the vital course of action to pursue right now. While Pogge obviously believes that more is necessary for justice than just sharing some wealth with the poor, it is apparent that he believes that something must be done to eliminate such horrendous poverty. Eliminating such poverty is what we should concentrate on immediately, and then we will go from there (as far as aid goes) after we see what the consequences of such actions are.
The Need for a Global Resources Dividend
Pogge is clear about the role that the wealthy countries play in the poor countries ways of life. It is not as though the poor have made themselves that way, rather the global environment has influenced them in a way that has been detrimental. Pogge writes "it is quite possible that, in a different global environment, the same national factors, or the same international differences, would have quite a different impact on human flourishing". The rich have contributed to making the poor, poor. It is not that all the blame is to be placed on the wealthy countries, but that they cannot claim that they have not contributed to the poverty of the many. "Yes, a culture of corruption pervades the political system and the economy of many developing countries", here Pogge addresses the issue of a dual-causal role in the plight of the poor. Of course it is the case that there are corrupt governments and violent civil wars that occur within poor countries, but when the First World has offered bribes and weapons to these corrupt and oppressive regimes how can they claim that they have not aided in the process of violence and poverty? Pogge here is developing the idea that it is not merely that the wealthy have a positive duty (out of beneficence) to the poor, but there is a negative duty present because the wealthy continually harm the poor. The three main entanglements, according to Pogge, between the wealthy and the poor are the "effects of shared institutions", the "uncompensated exclusion from the use of natural resources", and the "effects of a common and violent history".
Pogge then outlines the need to establish a Global Resources Dividend to help ameliorate the problem of poverty. The GRD would be a payment made by the users of natural resources to the poor of the world who do not use such resources, but have an "inalienable stake in all limited natural resources". This amount would go to the poorest of the poor. Pogge states that a "one-percent GRD would currently raise $300 billion annually . . . $250 for each person below the international poverty line, over three times their present average annual income". Such a dividend would not be a significant burden for the wealthy countries at all, and the poor could gain enormous benefit from such a dividend. The implementation of the GRD would be as simple as possible, with international organizations playing a large role when necessary.
There are a lot of details regarding the GRD that I will not go into here, because I want to focus more thoroughly on the problem relating to culture. For now, I will say that the GRD is a viable alternative to current foreign aid programs like the United States Agency for International Development, which ends up giving a lot of aid to corrupt leaders and to government bureaucracy. I contend that such aid is necessary, right now, given the deplorable condition of the poor. I also contend that there should be a focus on, and movement towards, establishing such a system to fight poverty, but this is not all that is needed. It may be argued that even if a GRD was put in place and called "moral", those wealthy nations will grow content by their moral deeds and not seek to continue in the process of aiding the worst off. If you put a lot of energy into one goal and claim that it is the moral imperative, people will be satisfied once they fulfill that goal. More will be said in about the use of the word "moral" or "just" as the case may be in the fifth section. For now, I will go into the benefits of a bottom-up, pragmatic approach to aid.
It is important to note that while the GRD is a bottom up move away from formal top-down theories, it still leaves open the question about what more is needed. What is required first off is a "movement" away from oneself and to the starving other; to simulate the other's experience as if oneself was starving. This may be hard to do accurately in some thought experiment, but I claim that it is absolutely necessary. If one puts oneself in the other's shoes (the other's subjective experience), one will most likely find that all thoughts are directed towards the problem of hunger (or, as the case may be, of shelter, adequate hydration, etc.). One does not think too much about what one thinks is right, what one wants to do in the future, etc. Instead, all thought is geared towards the next meal for oneself and perhaps one's family. Now when one gets enough to eat and has the means to subsist (access to needs and resources), one will then start to think about what one thinks is right, what one wants to do in the future, etc. It is after these subsistence needs are met that one begins to think about society and its functioning, and the possible establishment of social institutions regarding healthy, education, economy, and government. So, it is important to lay out a plan of aid and development that takes into account the gradual empowerment that the other will gain by having his or her needs of subsistence met. One must not proceed by listing certain freedoms and institutions as being necessary and thrown down from the sky, or from the wealthy onto the dependent to keep them that way. Instead, it is important to recognize that the people of the Third World, once their subsistence needs are met, may be more active in creating values to uphold and pursue, as well as the institutions necessary to meet goals. Culture can flourish if the people are fed, have access to safe water, and have clothing and shelter. This brings me to the other problem that plagues my "moral sensitivity", that is the problem of cultural hegemony and the cultural self-denigration on the part of the Third World that sometimes results. While it was crucial to "get into" the subjective experience of starvation earlier, it will be equally crucial to do the same regarding the state of affairs brought about by the global cultural hegemon.
Cultural Hegemony
Cultural hegemony is the state of affairs in which some culture has a preponderant influence over another culture or other cultures. Today, it is clear that the West, and the United States in particular, has such an influence over much of the rest of the world. The spread of multinationals all over the globe has shifted the way capital and labor is moved dramatically. Multinationals have an almost ubiquitous presence. Of the most successful has been the Coca-Cola Corporation. As the colorful Harrison Jones articulated, "The Coca-Cola Company is like an elephant's ass. You throw a rock in any direction and you're likely to hit it". Less humorously, in fact, rather creepily, James Peck, in an interview with Mark Pendergast, stated that Coke "is more durable, less vulnerable, and more self-correcting than the Roman Empire. This product is destined to outlast the USA".
There are four aspects of this cultural hegemony that I will focus on here. First, there is the more overt influence which involves economic shaping of values (multinationals). As William McBride writes, "multinationals are dictating the range of preferences" and those preferences that lie outside this range are ignored. Multinationals offer certain products to the local country, but these products often are completely foreign to the local people. However, the locals eventually conform to Western tastes because much of the time that is all they have to choose from since local businesses often die out after the wealthy multinational corporation comes in. This is evident in the case of Coca-Cola in the Philippines, according to Pendergast, where "indigenous beverages such as kalamansi (lime juice) and buko (coconut water) have virtually disappeared except for ceremonial use." Local businesses and products simply cannot compete. When they collapse, what is left is a culture that has been shaped in a way to facilitate profit for the multinational for years to come.
Secondly, there is the effect of mass media and the potential for mass
culture that follows. The influence of mass media on the rest of the
world is enormous. American news networks such as CNN and FoxNews broadcast
American news as the news of the world. Such information is spread around
the world giving a strictly American perspective on world affairs. Outside
of the news, there is the overwhelming influence of
Western culture (which is "given" as mass culture) on the Third
World. Zygmunt Bauman describes a shift (during the rapid changes brought
on by globalization) from a
Foucaultian panopticon (where the powers that be, the few, overlook the many) to a synopticon where the many end up watching the few. This means that the eyes of the local peoples watch the celebrities of the First World. Typically, these celebrities are the Michael Jordans, the Mel Gibsons, and the Britney Spearses of the world. That is, those who exude an aura of success and the American way of life, the way of life for all to try to model. The goal is to be like them. These celebrities "hover over the world" and are the "royalty that guides instead of ruling".
Third, the proliferation of the English language throughout the world serves to marginalize local languages. This produces a detrimental effect on those cultures as language is fundamental to cultural maintenance and flourishing. As Puchala writes, "language is the vehicle of culture and to silence it is to suffocate culture and to steal identity". The growing dominance of the English language, especially in economic and political discourse lessens the importance of other languages and the peoples who express them. The rest of the world is increasingly required to speak on Anglo-American terms as English becomes the standard.
Before investigating the fourth aspect of cultural hegemony, a quick detour towards a phenomenon that captures all three of the aforementioned components of cultural hegemony will aid in getting a more thorough understanding of how the various elements of cultural hegemony mesh together to have such a forceful affect on the entire world. This phenomenon is advertising. Pendergast mentions William Haviland's Cultural Anthropology textbook in reference to a glaring example of how Coke has infiltrated the globe. In the textbook, according to Pendergast, there is a picture captioned by the title "The Future of Humanity". In the photo a "black-robed, gray bearded patriarch is reading a newspaper below a Hebraic Coca-Cola sign". According to Pendergast, the section of the textbook deals with the worries about a drastic cultural homogenization in the near future. McBride also discusses advertising as "the global corporate effort to entice the whole world's population into lusting after goods of the sort . . . and into buying them to the extent of their resources and beyond." Such advertising is part of the economic sway of multinationals, in particular, to use different forms of media and the growth of English speakers throughout the world to get consumers worldwide to buy their products.
The fourth aspect of cultural hegemony is the more subtle mechanism of transculturation, in which the hegemon borrows from, and transforms, a local culture in such a way so as to receive some benefit. This is especially the case in various portrayals of various cultures in the entertainment industry. Joseph Chan uses the example of the Disney animated feature, Mulan, to illustrate how transculturation works. The traditional story of Mulan goes back to feudal China, and is a story about a girl who, out of love and a sense of honor for her father, joins the army. The traditional story casts this love as obligatory due to the attention given in China to filial piety and obedience. The Hollywood version of the story, on the other hand, while playing off on the idea of love for one's parents, does not focus on the obligatory nature of such love, but casts the father-daughter relationship as one of reciprocal love because Western audiences would not buy into such a story of filial piety. Also in Mulan there is a sense of individualism and a coming to be of womanhood along feminist lines which are clearly not a part of the ancient Chinese tale. To keep Mulan accessible to American audiences Disney simply altered the story so as to balance the appeal to American and Chinese audiences. Disney was able to "reconfigure" another culture in such a way to maximize profits.
These four components of cultural hegemony serve as a launching pad into an investigation of the cultural problems faced by local cultures in the globalization process, which according to Chan, and I agree with him, "has received even less empirical attention [than the economic effect of globalization on the locals]". The most significant problem is not only the attitude that much of the Third World takes towards the First World, especially the United States, but also the attitude individuals within these dominated societies take towards themselves. This is the problem of self-denigration of the Third World. Not only does the cultural hegemon seem to belittle other cultures, but the people who could affirm their culture are belittling it as well, as a type of cultural "throwing in the towel". The rest of this essay is directed toward the reaction of the dominated culture to itself and to the dominating culture, and to what we must do in response.
Self-denigration or Hatred of the Rest: Reactions of the Third World
In reaction to the presence of the growing cultural homogenization brought on by cultural hegemony of the West, the Third World is left struggling for a ground and an identity. Desperate and troubling times often result in a move toward the extremes. On the one hand there is a self-denigrating attitude towards one's own culture, and on the other hand, a struggle centered on identity and hatred directed towards the dominant cultural influence. The first seems to be a submissive giving in to the homogenization of culture and the second is more of a nationalistic fervor with an often violent intent. Bauman portrays this difference as being between "complementary differentiation" and "symmetrical differentiation". Complementary differentiation is the response of passivity to the dominant group's asserting X, Y, and Z. If "assertive behavior is not responded to in the same currency, but meets with submissiveness" it is likely this reaction will serve to bring about more of the same from the dominant group. The dominant group will keep asserting itself over and above the dominated group, and the dominated group will continue to submit. For example, if American companies, advertising, and cultural icons come in, either literally or through mass media, laying down "American values" and norms, the response is one that allows for further assertions of the same nature. This begins a cycle of defeat for the local culture and over time, one may begin to wonder just what culture one has for oneself anymore. The effect on the peoples of the submissive culture is a type of mystification, that is, they start to uphold and identify with the values of the dominant culture even though to do so is really not in their own interests.
Symmetrical differentiation, on the other hand, is a response in kind. When the dominant group asserts X, Y, and Z, the subordinate group with respond with its own X, Y, and Z. It will be its own X, Y, and Z though. That is, the subordinate group will use whatever resources it has to assert itself. In the case of someone in the Third World when one sees American cultural dominance as a type of violence to one's own culture, one will respond with one's own violence, and the cultural means to do so may not be there because one does not have similar access to the world's media, and one does not have such cultural icons and economic power to exactly mirror American influence. So some other type of violence is substituted in. This itself often takes the form of an attack of the very "values, culture, and institutions that make up liberal society", which for Benjamin Barber is the definition of jihad and the war against "McWorldism". For writers in the Third World, the self-denigration of the general populace towards their own culture fuels the fire and the formers insistence on gaining "self-determination and regaining self-respect . . . more than a 'standing against' and something more like ejecting, purging, and replacing."
This may provide a way to gauge to judge the overall reaction, in general, of the people in the Third World. It is the general populace who turns disrespect and denigration back inward, and the intellectuals who often seek to turn this back outward in the name of struggle for identity and self-respect as a culture.
What is needed however is an understanding of how one would come to respond with either extreme. Here it will be necessary to return to the method of simulation or empathetic understanding that was important above in getting a picture of what life would be like as a starving person. Now, the question is, as the imaginative scenario's starting point, "What would it be like to have another culture's values and norms swamp over one's own culture's values and norms, and how would one respond? What thoughts would run through one's mind?"
Putting oneself into the other's shoes in this scenario is once again very difficult for someone who is a part of the dominant culture, whose influence is seen, heard, and felt worldwide, and whose tools for expression are vast. Yet to do so is necessary to understand the many in the Third World. So, an oppressive cultural invasion with strong economic backing occurs and one is left struggling to figure out how one's own culture even matters any more. There is a sense in which it becomes extremely self-evident that as McBride puts it, "the achievements of one's own culture are increasingly being discounted through a kind of global conspiracy without identifiable individual conspirators, on the world culture 'market'." There is no one to turn to directly to engage in face-to-face as the perpetrator; there are few ways to externalize such feelings of marginalization, and if one does not resort to a sometimes violent attack on the invading culture, one is left turning inward.
When no one else is paying attention to you, it is extremely easy to stop paying attention to yourself and your own talents and possibilities. This is the case in the Third World in particular. There is a lack of positive creative self-images regarding one's own expressive possibilities and one's own culture's ability to flourish. Cultural creations are commodities to be bought and sold and one loses the feeling that one has anything to put up for sale.
Obviously this is also due to the aforementioned effect of global poverty, and that is why it is vitally important to give aid as described above now, as it is not likely for such individuals to even care about expressive potentialities or cultural flourishing. Yet the effects of cultural hegemony do affect those who are not as miserably poor as the worst off, and if a state of affairs is brought about so that the poorest of the poor do get aid from such a GRD to raise their quality of life, they will still fall prey to the effects of cultural hegemony.
What Do We Do About it?
Along with the aid given through the GRD (or something similar) to help fight global poverty, we should also be willing to give aid to help build schools, roads, libraries, and grants for art projects and scientific research (and not technological expertise for the benefit of multinationals) in the Third World as necessary to support the empowerment of the Third World. We must do so, in a step-by-step process along pragmatic lines to meet with the desires of the people in the Third World. Yet this is not all that is needed. A longer project must be undertaken. This is a project that has no specific procedures that will determine how we treat the Third World. It is up to us as the privileged wealthy to come to the other however, it is not merely a matter of the culturally dominated to gain self-respect through their own means somehow. We have to do something for the benefit of everyone, and we must start this now, because of the state of world affairs today. I have alluded to the project to be undertaken earlier. Broadly speaking, it is a project of coming to the other, but not as we have been doing already. The coming to the other that is necessary relies on a process of listening to the other, that is, of letting cultures of the Third World affect us. We have to build an empathetic understanding of other peoples in the contexts in which they live. Too much thinking on the part of Western intellectuals and "commoners" alike is mired in an attempt to understand others without understanding their contexts that play significantly in shaping them.
In emphasizing the role of empathy to play in such a project I use the word "we", as in, "we must be empathetic" and "we must imagine life as the other", but is this "we" nothing more than a bunch of separate individuals on "islands" pretending to be someone else? How can it truly become a "we" as in a body of individuals who can cause change in the world? It is nice for an individual to be able to engage in such empathetic understanding, but in order for this understanding to have a positive effect on the dominated peoples of the Third World, there is going to have to be some organization of individuals engaged together around some common goal. International non-governmental organizations that serve to help those in the Third World are going to have to grow in number and are going to have to be funded significantly to bring about desired change. They will have to have two primary objectives. First they will need to engage the people of the Third World in open dialogue and support attempts of cultural achievement. Second they will need to communicate with the powers that be in the First World and have a dramatic, visible presence to the people of those countries, communicating to them how other people live and why they think and act the way they do.
These organizations cannot remain diffuse and distanced from each other. By banding together they can be a force for change by organizing mass lobbying efforts in the public eye and in the halls of Congress. Politicians are not going to engage in empathetic understanding of the people in the Third World, so the people that actually do are going to have to let politicians know exactly what it is like to do so, and what one can learn from doing so. This will all be done with the hope that such lobbying will bring about changes in the way multinational corporations are regulated, in the way our media characterizes Western culture and Western history, and in the way education curricula (especially in the U.S.) are set up.
Moving away from the effects on politicians, and back to the role of international non-governmental organizations serving to bridge gaps between the people of the First and Third Worlds, it is important to note the difficulties in building such bridges due to the real differences between cultures and culture spheres. We must proceed without any Habermasian illusions. We must, however, learn from postmodernity and construct new ways of thinking and engaging with the world. Both Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida have called for "infinite justice". The U.S. government has recently used this phrase with something entirely different in mind, so to appeal to this phrase now may be dangerous. The responsibility that goes with such a sense of justice is important to keep in one's mind when thinking about the Third World, however. A project that demands radical openness and understanding of the other is a difficult one, and one that is certain to come under a lot of criticism from those who equate understanding with justifying. It may be the case that those who do so have never understood another person in their life, because to understand another is certainly not to automatically justify the other's thinking or actions. As soon as someone engages in empathetic understanding of the starving poor and the self-denigrated culturally dominated, one will certainly see that justifying does not go hand in hand with understanding.
This project of listening and understanding different contexts across cultures does not collapse morality into cultural relativism. As Calvin O. Schrag writes,
"What is required is a transversal ordering and communication that is achieved through a diagonal movement across the groups, acknowledging the otherness and integrity of each while making the necessary accommodations and adjustments along the way"
What is needed is a process that appeals to universality of principles, while recognizing differences across various social contexts, and relaying an understanding of these principles across contexts, not to exact convergence, but to arrive at meeting points at given times to increase understanding. All this can be done while allowing for each other to go along as different cultures transversing common understandings.
The people of the Third World need to be able to live and to at the very least not have to turn their sense of marginalization inward in the form of self-denigration. I believe that a lot of work needs to be done both in theory and in practice to bring about a better state of affairs so as to allow these necessary changes to occur, but I at least have pointed towards a path that may prove fruitful in the global context. The important thing to remember as we proceed in these times is that one must be willing to think as if one were the other to get an understanding of what his or her life might be like in his or her context. If democracy is supposedly a promotion of free thought, so-called democratic societies must do more to bring about the ability of others to engage in free thought without spending all their time thinking about how they are starving or how bad they feel about their own culture's apparent inferiority to the invading culture in the process of globalization.